


Stay with me, go places (all the way from Derry to Portland)

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Background Relationships, Dreamsharing, Gen, I can't help it they're just in love your honor, Minor Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Time Travel, background-to-the-background bill/mike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 01:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30081591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: Richie nods like that makes any sense at all. “Dreams within dreams. LikeInception.”“No, Richie, not likeInception.”“Are you sure? Because layering one person’s dream into another person’s dream sounds like we’re flirting with a copyright violation to me.”
Kudos: 2





	1. Portland with Bev

**Author's Note:**

> No archive warnings, but there's discussion of a canonical suicide, as well as canonical traumatic events and trauma responses.
> 
> In which I once and for all challenge Stephen King to a rock-paper-scissors duel over his assertion that fantasy-amnesia can be both the problem and the solution.
> 
> Many thanks to Aria for the beta and encouragement, all remaining mistakes are my own!

One thing they won’t remember again until much later, for obvious reasons, is that the forgetting doesn’t happen all at once, the first time. In fact, three weeks after Beverly first left Derry for Portland (and one week after her hearing at the juvenile court over the attack on her father) when she rides her bike down to the Greyhound station to meet the Losers as they step off the bus and shuffle, blinking, into the bright September sunlight, it hasn’t started yet at all.

Stanley looks better, she thinks. When she left town, there had still been something drawn in his expression, not to mention the bandage wrapped around his head, but now, he grins when he sees her, and offers a shy hug, the only one of them to do so. Since they’ve all come down on the bus for the day, Bev is the only one here with a bicycle, so they troop along after her, back to her aunt’s apartment to drop it off. Beverly knows she’s still an unknown quantity in this neighborhood, and as she leads her boys down the sand-worn brick sidewalks through the late-summer heat, she thinks she can sense the neighbors peeking out from behind curtains, taking note of Beverly, not alone for once, leading the way down this street like she knows it.

The next time, she has a better idea of where to take them, for their big day in the big city. There’s something fun about playing local, now that she’s lived there a few months, now that she knows the side-streets and bus routes and thrift shops, the good cafes, the ones that won’t mind too much if the seven of them crowd around a single table and hang out for an hour or three while one or two of them nurses a single coffee drink. The time after that, she’s still glad to see them, but in a kind of muted way — she’s got bad memories of Derry, and Portland isn’t _that_ great — she’s already plotting her escape to New York or Chicago or LA when she graduates — but it’s still miles better than being trapped back where they are.

In the seven months between their second visit to her and their third, both Ben and …the other one — red hair and quiet surety, sad eyes, _Bill_ — had moved out of town, and she hasn’t thought of any of them much in months, but the four who show up at the bus station that Saturday morning feel oddly subdued. “Ben hasn’t written to you?” Stanley asks her, as they’re walking to the city bus stop from the station, and now that he’s said it, it does feel strange not to have heard from him.

“Nah, but I’m sure he’s Hangin’ Tough,” she says, the flicker of a smile stretching across her face, but when she looks back at them, she doesn’t catch even a hint of recognition on the other boys’ faces, which — of course. That’s the point. Ben’s not _here_. She clenches her hand, that one with the odd scar she got messing around out in the Barrens with the guys, that last summer before she moved here.

And it’s good to see them, this time around, but something does feel odd and off-balance about it, like every time she speaks, she keeps turning her head, looking for a reaction that’s not going to come.

By the time Bev gets out of class at the end of the day on Friday of her junior year to find a lanky boy in coke-bottle glasses leaned up against the side of an old beater of a pickup — a half-rusted-out Toyota, recognizable as one only because the place where the brand name is blazoned across the back panel of the truck-bed has been painted over in clumsy black to read “TOYODA” — waiting for her, she almost doesn’t remember who he is.

They planned this, sort of. The last time the remnants of the Losers came up to visit her, just before the end of the last school year, Richie was already talking a mile a minute about how he was saving up his money so he could get a car as soon as he got his license, about how he had his permit, about how he was going to pass his test so hard it wouldn’t even know what hit it. Eddie had shoved him, said, “Good luck, but I’m pretty sure noticing streetlights is a requirement for passing the test, so I’m not gonna hold my breath,” and Richie had caught him in a headlock and stage-whispered to Bev that Eddie was just jealous because his mother didn’t want him driving yet, which Beverly, with a flash of memory of Eddie’s mom’s disapproving eyes catching on her bare legs in shorts, had concluded was probably an accurate assessment. Looking at Richie, she remembers all of it, and she laughs in relief, hurrying down the steps in front of the school towards him.

“Ringwald!” he cries, delighted grin on his face, and holds his hand out for a high-five. She goes for it, but when he yanks his hand up at the last minute so she’ll have to jump to make contact, instead of playing along, she laughs and catches him up in a hug.

“Richie, you asshole,” she cries, ignoring the disapproving look from the vice-principal hovering near the crosswalk, “Where are the others?”

“What, one man not enough for you, baby?” he says in what she’s pretty sure is supposed to be an Elvis voice. “Would you believe those delinquents are all grounded, and I’m the only one free to come see our best girl?”

“No,” she says, “I probably wouldn’t,” and “So these are your wheels? Gonna take me out on the town?”

It’s a good line, but the truth, Beverly thinks, settling into the passenger’s seat, is that while there are some spots around town she could take him, right now, in the rush of remembering what it’s like to have friends like Richie and the guys, she doesn’t really want to take him to hang out with other people. She wants to keep him to herself, and he doesn’t seem to be in too much of a rush to rejoin civilization, either. Instead, he lets her direct his car to a spot she knows in a private little stand of trees on the western Prom, and bully him into lying down in the soft, dry pine needles beside her and share a joint, and it’s only then that she asks him again why he’s come alone.

He looks up at the canopy of the tree and says, “Well, you know, it’s homecoming.” ’Tis the season, so while Beverly didn’t actually know the date for homecoming in Derry, she’s not shocked. Still, she’s not sure what that has to do with it.

“Well, not that much, probably. Stan moved, you know,” he tells her, cutting a glance in her direction, and she nods. She didn’t know, but she does understand the mood better, now that she does. Richie and Stanley have always — she thinks with a strange certainty that doesn’t come with any memories attached, just certainty — been close. “And I wasn’t totally lying, Mike is grounded,” he grins a little smugly. “Kept him out a little too late when I first got my car.” Beverly nods, but she knows the next point is going to be the most important one, the one that answers why he’s here now, instead of waiting so he can bring the rest of them. “And it’s homecoming,” he finishes just where he started. “The dance is tonight,” and then, finally, slowly, “Eddie’s got a date.”

She waits, but nothing else is forthcoming. “You didn’t want to go?” she prods, and then, remembering his insinuations at her out in front of the school earlier, teasing, “No pretty girl caught your eye? No one you want to take to the sock-hop?”

“Well, you know, Red,” he tells her seriously, “No girl’s as pretty as you.”

“Flatterer,” she says, knows she’s grinning at him so her dimples show. He’s not interested, Richie — she’s pretty sure he never has been. Beverly’s good at knowing when there are eyes on her that want something, whether they’re coming from the football player who sits across from her in English who doesn’t know her name but does stare at her tits for several hours a day every week or Wendy who says she only kissed Bev at that bonfire over the summer as a joke, or — well. Beverly doesn’t like thinking about Derry.

For a minute after that, Richie doesn’t say anything, and he’s still looking at her, and it’s not like — it’s _not like_ he wants her, so Bev tries to think it through, to figure out where else the heavy weight of this conversation is coming from. After a minute, she tries, “So, no pretty girls. Any pretty someone-elses?”

It’s a risky question, but the quiet space under the pine needles feels like it’s made for telling secrets, and if there’s one thing Bev knows about the Losers (sometimes it feels like there _is_ only one thing Bev knows about the Losers), it’s that they wouldn’t hurt her, so she takes the risk for what it is. Again, for a moment, silence.

“There’s this — this guy,” Richie says, staring up at the treetop as Bev turns her head, the side of her face pressed into the bed of dried-out pine needles to stare at his profile. “We’re friends and sometimes I think — I think if I just told him — it’s like there’s something _waiting_ there, for me, something good, maybe, and if I could just tell him, maybe I could reach out and take it, but I _can’t_.”

Beverly wonders briefly if the guy he’s talking about is — but the name flits away like something on the tip of her tongue — she knows it, he just _said_ it, but somehow it’s not there in her mind so she can get to it. Maybe it doesn’t matter, though. She hasn’t really known Richie well for years, it would be ridiculous to think she might already know who he has a crush on. “Well, talking about feelings is hard for everyone,” she says, although she’s not actually sure anything has been that hard for her since she left Derry. Even when she’s living it, when it’s the only reality she can touch, sometimes the whole time she’s been living in Portland feels like a dream.

“It’s not _that_ ,” he tells her, and she thinks she’s faintly offended by his dismissal of what she was pretty sure is a fairly universal sentiment. “It’s not that it’s _hard_ , it’s that I _can’t say it_. There are, you know,” and here, finally, he shoots a quick glance in her direction. “There are guys who are, like. _Out_. In Derry. Not too many, but there’s this one guy who does drama, and a student teacher in the music department, and I think only about two thirds of the rumors about the girls soccer team are completely made up. So it’s like — I know it’s an _option_ , and it’d probably suck balls, but whatever, we’re the Losers club, people practically expect it, right? But I just can’t say it. About myself. the words won’t leave my mouth.”

Bev nods, takes a drag off the neglected joint to buy herself a second, exhales a cloud of smoke and says, slow and worldly, “Yeah, well, that’d be the sewer clown.”

The first moment she says it, it feels heavy, meaningful, a little frightening. She turns her head to look at Richie again and finds that he’s staring back. His gaze feels like it weighs just as much as her words, and as much as she can’t quite pin down the meaning of what she just said, she thinks it might be the truest thing she’s said in years. She sways a little towards Richie, and he reaches for her, and then a giggle bubbles up in her chest.

The hand that he drops on her shoulder is shaking with laughter, too, and it just goes on — it’s the kind of laughter you can’t breathe through, and she can hear Richie gasping through his, as well. It reminds her, a little, and then completely, all of the sudden and in a rush, of the way her daddy used to tickle her when she was little, bright and breathless as she grinned at first, but then longer and longer as she gasped and begged him to stop between breaths full of giggles. It goes on, and it goes on, and Richie’s hand clinging to her shoulder is her only anchor in the sea of horrible laughter, so she reaches back towards him, and then the ember still clutched between her fingers burns his shirt, and he shrieks, and she jumps back, and suddenly, they can breathe again.

“ _Well_ , that’s enough of that, I think,” Bev says, pushing herself upright and brushing the dry pine-needles aside to reveal a blank stretch of dirt to stub out the ember.

Richie says, “Yeah, I’m starving, where can a man get a decent burger in this town? Gotta get some real sustenance if I’m going to drive back in to hell tonight.”

After they’ve eaten, and cruised around the Prom enjoying the sunset and the freedom a car allows, and made excuses about missing rush hour, and killed some time flipping through sidewalk record bins, after Richie has driven her home and declared, reluctantly, that he needs to drive back to Derry, he hugs her. “Thanks for this, Ringwald — I think I really needed to spend a day in civilization,” he tells her.

“Any time,” she says, hugging back. “Now that you’ve got wheels, I’d better start to see a lot more of you, okay?”

“You just try to keep me away,” he says, flashing finger-guns. It’s the last she sees of any of the guys for the next twenty-three years.

…

“Yeah, my parents moved us all to Michigan a couple of months later,” he admits, a few days after killing Pennywise the clown for the second time. “Surprise promotion for my mom, move decided on and then completed in three weeks flat, and Eddie here refused to hide away in my suitcase, so that was the last I remembered of any of you.”

In the rearview mirror, set in front of Richie’s teasing face in the back seat, Beverly can see a corner of Eddie’s scowl from where he’s driving while she rides shotgun in the drive down to the Portland Jetport. It’s unclear whether the annoyed expression is directed at the newly-excavated memory of Richie’s teenage move away from Derry, Richie’s characterization of the event, or the jolting of the potholes in the road on the stitches in his chest.

“It is not _my fault_ that _you moved_ ,” Eddie says, clearing up at least a bit of that confusion.

“No, but it’s your fault you didn’t even entertain the idea when I begged you to run away with me.” The way Richie says it is all dramatics and bravado, but Bev remembers the tentative thread of hope in his voice, sixteen years old and just a little stoned, voice shaky but brave, saying, _it’s like there’s something waiting there, for me, something good, maybe._

“I wouldn’t have actually fit in your suitcase, doofus,” Eddie says, but there’s something wondering and sweet on his face, too — the warmth of an unburied memory which may not have been of a good moment, but which is rooted in a friendship he’s spent a long time without — or maybe Bev’s projecting, there. She thinks it’s a shared feeling, though, the weird void they’ve been living in for all these years. It hasn’t just taken the place where these friendships — good, strong connections which they should have had the opportunity to either lean on or grow out of naturally — had been, but an emptiness that had expanded, rippled, and kept them — kept _Beverly_ — from getting close to people. If she’d been able to make the kind of network of friendships, of close family, that she sees in other people, Beverly thinks, maybe Tom would never have managed to fit himself into the space that was left. Maybe Bev’s projecting, though — _yeah, you think?_ she muses to herself. _’Maybe' my ass_.

The truth is that Beverly doesn’t really know what she’s going back to, particularly. Her company, maybe; a legal battle, definitely; a hotel room that’s somehow both cold and stuffy; _space_ , which is good, probably, since she doesn’t think she should see Bill or Ben again until she knows what she wants to say when she does, but the notion of which doesn’t feel as freeing as it would have even a week ago, now that she remembers how it feels again to be surrounded by people who she loves. Kay, maybe — the thought pops into her mind, surprising her. When she gets on this plane back to Chicago, she’s going back to Kay, maybe. It’s not actually a bad thought.


	2. Dreams are places, too

Inside his body, Richie is leaned up against the window of the back seat of Eddie’s car, and if he knew that he was drooling slightly, or that Eddie keeps cutting quick glances towards his face in the rearview mirror, he’d be mortified, but as it is, he doesn’t notice, because he is asleep. Inside his brain, Richie is sixteen years old and skipping rocks in the creek with Stanley. Stanley is saying goodbye because education is important to his parents, and the Derry school system has recently been rated very badly by a national survey of public schools, so he’s being sent to start high school living with his aunt in upstate New York.

“I’ll see you on every school break,” Stanley is saying now, just as he’d said it then. “You know Aunt Miriam will want a break from me, and my parents will, y’know, probably want to see me again.”

Richie looks down at his hands, big still, but in an awkward way now, because at the time of this memory, the rest of his body hadn’t grown into them, yet. The hands, he notices, as he stares down at them, detached, are clutched around a rock — a flat one, a good one, and it ought to skip, but the Richie who’s living inside this memory now hasn’t skipped rocks in years, and muscle memory doesn’t quite kick in, either, leaving him to try to curve those strange his-not-his fingers awkwardly around the stone’s angles. “You know, even when you said it then, I knew it wasn’t true,” he tells Stan, and then he lets the rock fly. It turns in the air with a bit of the right kind of momentum, but when it makes contact with the water, it sinks.

“Yeah, I think I knew that, too,” Stan replies, but this time it isn’t the child’s voice Richie remembers, but the voice of a man who he never knew. “But you looked so sad, and you were so allergic to feelings at that age, seeing you upset like that freaked me out. I had to say something to make you feel better.”

“Yeah, you always were more of a grownup,” Richie agrees, looking back down at those strange, adolescent fingers to keep from looking over at Stan. He doesn’t know whether it would be worse to look over and see that adult’s voice coming from the body of the boy he remembers, or to look over and finally have a face to pin to the man Stanley grew up into without him. “So why are you here now?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Richie can see Stan let another rock fly, heading creekward. “Same thing, really,” Stan says, again in his adult voice. The rocks skips twice, three, four, five times, each skip smaller than the last, before it sinks. “Saying goodbye.”

“I thought you did that already,” Richie says like he doesn’t want to be here, like he isn’t fighting with his body’s attempts to become aware of the motion of the car beneath him, the hum of conversation between Beverly and Eddie in the front seat, trying desperately to stay asleep in this moment of dappled sunlight and the last time he saw Stanley Uris alive. “Mike got your note, he shared it with us, and it kind of implied that there’s another copy waiting for me in my mailbox back at home. Considerate of you, looking up all of our addresses like that. Mine’s definitely not supposed to be listed anywhere you can find, you know.”

“Richie, look at me,” Stanley says, and the voice may be older, but the tone is one Richie knows, now that he knows himself again, from an entire childhood of understanding that this tone of voice only comes out when it’s important. Richie looks.

Richie looks, and he sees. He sees Stanley the sixteen-year-old with the brave, miserable, hangdog look in the back seat of his dad’s station wagon as he drove away from town forever, and he sees the man Richie never got the chance to meet, the kind, sad one with the dry sense of humor who his wife is still mourning. He sees Stanley filthy and crying and cursing them all out under the house on Neibolt street for leaving him alone and Stanley laughing so hard he squirts chocolate milk out his nose at the lunch table in the second grade and Stanley at six years old coloring in all of the zeros on his addition and subtraction worksheet with a piece of blue crayon, Stanley staring his father down through his speech at his Bar Mitzvah, Stanley writing “Be proud” into his suicide note for Richie, just for Richie. 

Stanley says, “It’s a gift, the forgetting. You’ll be at the airport soon, and you’ll still remember enough, Portland is close enough not to forget completely, and you and Eddie and Bev will still be together, for a little while, anyway, which helps, but once you’re on separate planes and up in the air, the forgetting will start. And it’s better this way, Richie. I just wanted to say goodbye first, just one last time.”

“I’m not going to forget you,” Richie says, and at first he thinks it’s his pubescent voice speaking, but the rough tone at the ends sounds more like the Richie of today, the man Stan never met, the man he thinks he maybe wouldn’t have become, if he’d had a friend like Stanley around. 

Through the kaleidoscope of a hundred different moments in time, all somehow centered around the same serious face, Stanley smiles. “Sure you will, but I won’t take it personally. Just promise me you’ll try to use it a little better this time, Rich. Promise me you’ll try to be happy.”

The car pulls into a parking spot at the Portland Jetport and Richie’s eyes jolt open just as it shudders to a stop. “Fuck _that_ ,” Richie says, and then, when Beverly and Eddie both turn around to stare at him from the front seat, “Thanks for the ride, Eds, but I’m not getting on that plane. I guess I live in Portland, now.”

…

“You can’t just stay in _Maine_ ,” Eddie insists, derisive, taking another offended sip of Dunkin Donuts coffee and leaning back in his chair against the big window looking out on the planes trundling around the tarmac and pulling up to their gates.

“Sure I can, Eds,” Richie tells him, tone, he’s pretty sure, only just _slightly_ manic. “People do it all the time, Portland’s a pretty happening city on the food scene, you know. Lots of,” he digs through his memories for things people have said to him to try to convince him to compromise on his refusal to go any further east that NYC on tour, “Lots of microbreweries.” Eddie makes a face.

Beverly’s looking at Richie, too, though, and she’s not masking her concern with teasing or disdain, which makes it harder to ignore. “Look,” he says, “In the car, I had this dream,” and then he’s telling them everything, both because Stanley was all of theirs and they all lost him and because the point of this is that he wants to _know_ them, he doesn’t want to start by hiding things from them.

“So, do you think — do you think it’s the clown?” Eddie asks, and the tension in his voice always runs right up near the surface, no playing it cool for their Eds — no _chill_ , as the kids would say. As he says it, his phone, which he keeps tucked in the front pocket of his oxford like he was the accountant and not Stan, starts buzzing with a call notification. Irritably, Eddie fishes it out of his pocket, glances idly at the display, and then hits the ‘ignore’ button.

“I don’t think so, I really do think we beat it,” Richie answers his question, and he _does_ think that, he has to or what is the _point_ , but also: “Stanley said it was a gift, the forgetting.”

They all sit there contemplating, Richie assumes, the sheer fucked-upedness of that idea for a few minutes, before Eddie tentatively suggests, “So maybe — do you think —? Do you think maybe he’s right? There’s a lot about all of this that’ll give me nightmares until I’m dead, unless I somehow manage to forget it. And it’s not like you can talk about any of it with a therapist.”

“‘See, doc, it all started with the demon clown in the sewer,’” Richie tries out, workshopping it a little. Bev giggles nervously. “You can go and forget if you want, Eds,” Richie says, dropping the voice and trying to sound like it won’t bother him too much if Eddie chooses this option. “If you want to move on, I can, like — I won’t bug you. But what do we have that’s so great to go back to? Or what do I have, I guess. You’re both, like, married, and shit,” Beverly may have been kissing Ben at the quarry after IT, but Richie’s not going to go around acting like he knows what that does or doesn’t mean for her, he’s only re-met her again a few days ago. “I get that it’s different for you. But I don’t have a ton to go back to and if I — if we forget this time, I bet it’s for keeps, but if I stay — maybe if one of us remembers, I can keep us all in touch.”

Richie only has the vaguest idea of what that might mean, he’s only been working on this plan for the twenty minutes it’s taken them to make their way out of the parking lot, into the jetport, and to grab a few cups of mediocre coffee and a table near where Beverly will go through security to board her flight. Both she and Richie have tickets flying out of Portland, and since Eddie is driving back to New York, he’d offered to drop them off on his way. Now that it sounds like Richie’s going to abandon his whole life to start again in Portland with nothing but a suitcase and the clothes on his back like some eighteen-year-old from up the county who thinks Portland is the big city, the fleet of luggage Eddie has stashed in the back of his car looks like more and more of a good idea.

“Richie, a week ago you were the one who wanted to leave Mike high and dry after the restaurant, leave town and never look back,” Eddie says, like he thinks he’s making some kind of point, and Richie _said_ he wouldn’t blame Eddie if he wanted to get back to his own life, but he’s a little miffed by how much Eddie seems to want Richie to forget, too.

“Sure man, only I seem to remember that you and I were both team ‘Run Now, Ask Questions Never.’”

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, caught, “But that was _different_.”

“Yeah,” he agrees combatively, “It was different. It was different because facing IT down could literally and plausibly kill all of us. Not wanting to give it the chance was a reasonable position, okay, but moving to Portland, Maine isn’t actually going to cause me any physical, bodily harm.”

“That’s what you think,” Eddie mutters darkly, but it looks like he’s thinking it through, too, and Richie is starting to remember Eddie, and how his little hamster wheel of a brain works; either he needs to turn new ideas in his head over and over again until he makes sense of them or he needs to charge in completely on instinct, without thinking about them at all — there’s no in-between. After a pause he says, “I have to go back to New York, Myra’s frantic,” but this time there’s something almost apologetic about how he says it.

“I know, man,” Richie tells him, forcing his grin a little wider, “That’s why I’m the one volunteering to fall on this grenade. If you want to not forget, I can try to, like, call you. Text you the same picture of the Welcome To Derry sign three times a day. Train carrier pigeons to follow you around and serenade you.”

“But Rich,” Beverly says, “How do you know staying here would even work?” Thank god for Bev, Richie thinks, for not even questioning the underlying idea behind this little plan.

Still, “Well I’m not going back to fucking Derry,” Richie snaps, but that’s not fair and he knows it, so he barrels right past her _no, of course not_ to actually answer the question. “But Bill and Mike haven’t forgotten yet,” or, at least, they hadn’t when Richie and Eddie and Bev and Ben had called them through one last chaotic mess of a group call in the car in the parking lot of the Bangor airport where they were dropping Ben off for his flight. Richie tries not to think about how many hours it’s been since then, and how many miles Mike and Bill might have driven away from Derry in that time. “And I think — I bet part of it’s that they’re together, and part of it’s that we keep calling and texting like the codependent freaks we’re apparently going to be, now that we know who each other are. And part of it’s probably that driving is slower than flying, so the distance is more gradual, so, uh, I guess I should call Ben as soon as his plane lands.”

Bev nods like any of that makes any sense, then says, “Okay, so I’ll stay here with you.”

“What?”

“ _What?_ ”

Richie and Eddie’s twin exclamations of disbelief overlap each other, and Richie catches Eddie’s eyes, which are massive, eyebrows raised and forehead all scrunched up, with some emotion Richie has no hope of identifying. It’s truly unfortunately adorable, and Richie hears his own reedy child’s voice calling out _cute, cute, cute!_ vividly enough that he has the oddest urge to shake his head to try to dislodge the imagined sound.

“Well, if you think Mike and Bill haven’t forgotten yet because they’ve had each other to remind them, and you won’t go back to Derry for obvious reasons, then it makes sense that you should have someone here with you to remember with. And Eddie has to go back to New York, and I—” she draws in a deep breath like she’s steeling herself, then says, “I need to get a divorce, probably, but in some ways I think it’ll be better if I try to do that from far away, anyway.”

Richie cuts another look Eddie’s way — it’s a risk, given the way the last one left him reeling, but what Bev just said is enough of a bombshell that he thinks he could use the solidarity. Eddie doesn’t let him down — he looks as unprepared as Richie. He looks speechless, too, which Richie guesses means it’s up to him to respond, so he looks back at Bev and says, “Sure, I’ll be your swingin’ single pal out on the town Ms. Marsh.”

Bev laughs, and she sounds relieved and disbelieving and a little giddy all at once, which Richie thinks is a fair and relatable series of emotions, really. Eddie throws up his hands and says, “Okay, but you guys really do need to keep calling me so I can tell you how much I’m not forgetting anything, and eventually you’ll realize you don’t need to move to Portland, Maine."

…

“Hey, Haystack! I know you can’t answer this because you’re on a plane, and you really shouldn’t even know I’m calling because your phone should be on airplane mode, right, buddy? But I bet you’re the kind of nerd who knows that tech advances mean that airplanes’ navigation systems are a long way away from being vulnerable enough that a couple of cell phone signals can mess with them, so who knows? Still, I bet you’re still enough of a teacher’s pet that — fucking _ouch_ , Beverly!”

“Hi, Ben. So, as you can hear, Richie and I never got on our flights. Rich apparently took the deadlights-psychic torch I passed to him and started talking to Stanley in his dreams, so we’re going to hang out in Portland for a while, and we think if you don’t come back, you might forget about us, too. Call us back when you get this, okay? Miss you already, New Kid.”

…

Richie is seven and he’s walking on the Uris’ porch railing like he’s a tightrope walker while Stan watches from below with worry and annoyance openly fighting for control on his round little baby face. The dream starts with the scene already begun, and when Richie blinks awake into it, he wobbles, nearly falling before he catches himself.

“I guess you really always were a stubborn little fuck, Rich,” Stan sighs in his piping child’s voice.

Richie is pretty sure that, in the memory this dream is plagiarizing off of, he actually did fall not long after this point, and that child-Stan had taken him by the wrist, dragged him into the bathroom, ignored his wriggling through the ordeal of pouring rubbing alcohol over the scrape on his knee, and then pasted a giant band-aid over it, which child Richie had picked away at until he’d pulled it off entirely before he got home for dinner that night. When Cindy Uris, probably made suspicious by the lack of yelling and name-calling, had come into the bathroom to see what they were up to, Stanley had already had Richie all patched up and calmed down. It’s a sweet memory, the kind of thing Richie thinks he might have shared at Stanley’s funeral, if he’d been invited, and he’s half tempted to just play it out to its end-point, here in this strange, vivid dream, but he’s pretty sure child-Stan wouldn’t have dreamed of swearing like that even if he’d known how, so he has an idea that doing so won’t be an option.

Instead, he plops down to sit on the porch rail, swings his sneakers back and forth, and says, “Well, you see, manly manly Stanley, I didn’t feel like we really had the chance to finish our conversation the other day. You stated your position, that having all memories of your childhood sucked out of your brain like a brain-smoothie through a straw was a good thing, but I didn’t really have the chance to politely decline the honor.”

Stan winces, probably at the mental image that analogy calls up, and turns to lean against the porch railing next to Richie. He’s tall enough to do that, and he’s folding his arms against his chest, and his arms are encased in a nice, classy, wine-red sweater, the kind of thing that looks like it’s probably cashmere, not that Richie knows what cashmere looks like, and he’s wearing a probably-cashmere sweater in a color that’s probably billed as burgundy at whatever very adult, rich-people store he buys it at because the person standing next to Richie is adult-Stanley again.

“It’s a wool-silk blend, actually,” Stan says, and, “Jesus, Rich, it’s not up to me.” He brings his hands up to rub at his eyes, and he looks tired in a way that feels incongruous with the fact that he’s here as some kind of fucked-up ghost-vision-hallucination. You would think, Richie thinks, that he would, actually, get the chance to rest, now that he’s dead.

“Then who’s it up to?” Richie asks, noting, with a faint sense of surprise, that he’s also standing, leaning against the railing of the porch of the house the Urises sold less than a year after they sent Stanley off to school in New York. He’s standing, leaning next to Stanley, because he’s an adult again, now, too. “C’mon, let me make a complaint to the manager, you know they almost always give you a voucher if you do. The customer is always right.”

Stan jostles him, knocking their shoulders together, and says, “Not if the customer is you.”

“Hey, at least I’m better than Eddie, man. You should have heard him at the restaurant when we all met up again, _and if I eat a peanut, I could realistically die_ , oh my god, classic Kaspbrak. Cashew?” And all of the sudden, Richie’s not sure. “Peanut, or cashew? Stan, which one is Eddie fake-allergic to, peanuts or cashews?”

Stan shakes his head, amused, but Richie feels panic starting to build underneath his breastbone. “Is this it? Is this how the forgetting starts?”

“No,” Stanley says, but he looks so sad now, so _sad_ , if Richie didn’t think his heart was about to explode over his own worry right now, he’d be worried for Stan instead, with how sad he looks. “No, Rich, I don’t know. And I don’t know. I don’t know what decided that we should forget, but I know it wasn’t the clown. When Mike called me, and all the forgetting slipped away and I — I tried to hold onto it, and something told me it was sorry, that it held off the memories as long as it could, and it wasn’t the clown, the thing that told me that was _kind_ , the forgetting was meant to protect us.”

Richie shakes his head like maybe he can shake away this adult body, this adult understanding, and live in the child-memory for a moment more. He says, “I don’t want to go back to what it was like before I remembered, Stan. It was — fine, kind of, being wildly successful is good, mostly, but I didn’t really—” Either Richie doesn’t know how to describe the feeling of distance that has defined the vast majority of his adult relationships, or he still doesn’t want to look at it closely enough to do so. The _I don’t WANT to_ statement feels at the same time far too vague and far too telling.

Stanley was always good at seeing through Richie’s bullshit growing up, but he hasn’t been here for the last week and a half or so since arriving in Derry, remembering an entire childhood like a baseball smashing through a window, destroying an ancient evil, then hanging around town through cleanup, police interviews, hospital visits, and Eddie Kaspbrak looking small and quiet and vulnerable coming out of a major surgery, so Richie isn’t sure that Stan actually has the context to understand all the things he isn’t saying. Still, Stan nods like he gets it. “I think,” he says, hesitant, “I think that it gets that — not IT-it, but, like, whatever this is, whatever power it is that tried to help us, I think it understands that you need to grow past who you were and I hope — I hope you’ll get to hang onto some of the growth, but Rich, I still think that what it means is that there are some things human minds aren’t meant to hold. That’s why the entire town’s-worth of adults could never see what was going on, they weren’t _set up_ for it.”

“Oh, like you know what my brain can hold,” Richie snaps, and he’s suddenly, through the sadness and worry and _missing Stan_ , furious. “Maybe you weren’t set up for it, okay, maybe you’re ready to forget like Bill’s parents after Georgie, but I went _back_ ,” he charges on, voice cracking over the last word, “And I stayed because you told me to, in, like, in my head, I think. In my memory. And I think I have proved that I can — um. Can handle knowing the things I already know. Better than I can handle forgetting them.”

Stan looks back and it’s the Stan who stood in a circle with them after IT the first time, face swathed in those bandages, expression miserable but determined. “Yeah, okay,” he agrees, and Richie thinks this is worse than when he was arguing. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then he flickers out of existence, and Richie is left alone on the porch.

…

Richie wakes to the sound of the phone ringing.

“Eddie says you won’t leave Maine because you’re afraid of forgetting everything again,” Bill says. “He says you’re moving to Portland, he says the deadlights messed with your mind and now we have to stage an intervention.”

“Been there, done that,” Richie yawns, “I think I still have a t-shirt from my rehab center. Not sure I bought it, though, I think it came with the residential program. That, or I just sweated on it too much, and they didn’t want it back.”

“Richie, focus,” Bill says, and something in Richie’s hindbrain still responds to that, to Big Bill Laying Down The Law. “You’re not the boss of me, Bill,” Richie says, just to cover the feeling up. Bill sighs.

“Eddie’s worried,” he says, and then, “He says you’re scared because of something you dreamed?”

“Don’t say it like that,” Richie says, feeling suddenly small and uncertain.

“Like what?”

“Like oh, poor, crazy Richie, he thinks his dreams are real.”

“Well, don’t you?”

Instinctively, Richie wants to deny it, but he went all in on telling Eddie and Bev, and when he’d done so, he’d known that that was the turning point. If he’s going to be honest with the Losers, he’s going to be honest with them. About most things, eventually, probably, assuming they get an eventually, but for now certainly about the things that affect all of them. “Yeah, maybe,” he says, “But I don’t think that’s much more far-fetched than anything else we’ve done since Mike called. And you’re the one who’s still dodging his movie-star wife’s calls about how you’re going to lose your spot on a many-million-dollar movie just so you can do a journey-of-discovery roadtrip with Mike, so why am I the one who’s getting the intervention?”

Bill sighs, and Richie would feel bad, but he’s pretty sure he’s in the right, here; Bill’s actions don’t get to be more self-evident than anyone else’s just because they’re _Bill’s_. “Because I’m not acting like my actions make sense,” Bill tries. “I know I’m self-destructing here.”

And that, actually, does get some sympathy out of Richie. He knows what that feels like better than he knows most things. He says, “I guess you’re calling to say that you and Mike haven’t forgotten anything, and I’m just being stupid?” He’s kind of hoping this is the case — he thinks he can still spin this whole Portland thing out into an extended vacation from living his own life for a while, just to make sure, but it would be nice not to have to be so worried about the forgetting creeping up. Bill sighs again, though, and Richie starts to get a sinking feeling in his gut.

“No,” Bill says, and then, “I guess I just thought — that we were coping better, me and Mike. Because we weren’t in Derry anymore, because we weren’t always seeing places where — where things happened. I guess I just thought we were healing, kind of. Because I still remember Mike, I still remember all of you. And I can remember how bad it felt, how scared we all were, and I remember — I remember the facts of what happened. Like I read them out of a book. But when Eddie called, and when he said what you thought, I tried to remember what it looked like, down their under Neibolt, and it’s like — it’s like a blank. I’ve got nothing.”

Richie feels a shiver go down his back like he’s in one of Bill’s cheesy fucking _books_ , because he hasn’t even tried to do that, he’s been so focused on running through the litany, _Eddie, Bev, Ben, Bill-and-Mike-are-in-a-car, STANLEY, Eddie, Eddie, Bev’s down the hall, Ben is on a plane, Bill-and-Mike-roadtrip, STAN_ that he hasn’t even thought to try and remember the bad shit, beyond remembering that there was bad shit. He shuts his eyes like that’s going to help and thinks: _Henry Bowers standing over Mike like he’s going to actually kill him this time, Bill all pale and silent at Georgie’s memorial service, Beverly leaping off the cliff over the quarry in her underwear, red hair shining in the sun as she hung in the air for a moment before she fell, the horrible angle of Eddie’s broken arm as he skittered backwards across the floor away from the advancing clown, I KNOW YOUR SECRET YOUR DIRTY LITTLE SECRET, the whirl of children floating overhead because WE ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE, blood pouring out of Eddie’s mouth when he went to speak, deadlights, a vulnerably beating heart_ — nope, definitely all still there.

“That sounds …kind of nice,” Richie says, despite himself.

“Yeah,” Bill says heavily. “It really kind of is.” After a breath, he shifts his tone back to a little more energetic, asking, “Hey, so you and Bev are staying in Portland a while?”

“Yeah.” That’s the plan, anyway, inasmuch as there is any kind of plan at all.

“Okay,” Bill says, “We’ll be back by late tomorrow.”

… 

Bev swears up and down that Steve wasn’t lying to Richie when he told him that Portland had become a well-known foodie town in the years since Richie has been avoiding the Northeastern part of the country like the plague. On their way out to lunch to prove it, Richie dials Eddie’s phone. When it rings through to voicemail, Richie thumbs it off before leaving a message.

“I’m sure he’s just not answering because he’s driving, Rich,” Beverly says with a sympathy that’s far too knowing-sounding for Richie’s taste, and then they’re off.

Portland looks different because of course it looks different; it’s been over twenty years since the last time Richie came out here to visit Bev, and it’s been about twenty since he last remembered that he’d done that to begin with. Richie says, “I feel like I should suggest some old haunt, but I don’t think we ever really had one of those around here.”

“Pretty sure we’ve been haunted enough, lately, Trashmouth,” Bev says, and Richie self-consciously pulls a baseball cap more firmly down over his eyes. He’s pretty sure no one’s going to recognize him here because it’s fucking Portland, and Richie hasn’t had a nationally broadcast show in a couple of years now. When he’s outside of L.A., these days he feels sort of comfortably anonymous, although if the kid at the restaurant in Derry taught him anything, it’s how illusory that feeling of safety had been. Anyway, no one turns to look at him when Bev says it.

They find a kitschy little place with outdoor dining and an extensive draft beer menu, and Richie leans back in his chair. This isn’t so bad, honestly. All these years of avoiding New England like he thought it would draw him back in like nightmare spider-silk wrapped around his balls, and now that he’s here, the parts that aren’t governed by a literal fear-monster are actually kind of nice. Richie drops his eyes closed into a long blink, enjoying the feeling of the sun on his skin and of not actually being in Derry anymore, and then he says, “I actually might stay here. Even if Bill and Mike sweep in and fix everything so we don’t forget each other.”

He’s got no real indication that Bill or Mike can do something like that, but he’s got the edge of an old feeling stuck there in the back of his mind that Bill _knows things_ , that Bill will know how to fix things, and in the years since, it’s Mike who’s actually known things, like who they all are, and what happened to them, and who has been pulling the invisible threads which shape their lives. It makes sense to Richie, that one of them will be the one to figure out what’s going on here. Probably one of them should be the one talking to Stan, anyway — Richie wonders what cosmic mix-up lead him to be the one getting Stanley’s celestial drunk dials.

Bev laughs. “And do what, become a lobsterman?”

“That can’t still be a job, can it?” Richie asks her, probably a little too loud if the looks the crowd at the next table over are giving him is any indication. Bev laughs again, but it’s an edgy, lightly scandalized one.

“Of course it’s a job,” she tells him, “Where the hell do you think the lobsters come from?”

“Well, you see, Beverly, when a lobster loves another lobster very much…”

“Excuse me,” the waitress cuts in, “But have you had a chance to check out the menu yet?” She’s got white-girl dreads and a nose ring, and she’s wearing flannel, but it’s a very fitted shirt, she looks about as Maine as Richie does right now, which, he reflects, probably tells him exactly nothing. 

When she’s taken their orders, Richie returns to his previous theme. “Really, though, it’s not half bad here. I don’t know if you remember how horribly jealous I was that you got to be a teenager here instead of in Derry.”

“Yeah, well,” Bev says, “Maine Child Welfare only awards you the teenage runaway package if you really prove that you mean it, and I didn’t see you taking Wentworth out with a shovel in the garden shed, Richard.” She laughs again as she says it, but it’s the same scandalized laugh that bubbled out of her at Richie’s last faux pas, like she can’t believe she’s saying all of this out loud.

Richie sighs to play along, tells her, “Yeah, that always was my problem — lack of initiative.” Joking about people’s childhood trauma, he knows, is a pretty dangerous game, so he’s relieved when she shakes her head, still grinning, and settles deeper into her chair.

Because he’s been thinking about their shared history of large-scale, geographically-specific amnesia recently, it feels right to ask her, “So, how did that work? Like, with your dad — I know you remembered us for a while because we used to come and see you, but the last time I called your aunt’s place, you didn’t know who I was, so—”

“Wait,” Bev asks, sitting up again, face unreadable, “When was that, I don’t remember this?”

“It was a few months after that last time I drove up to see you. You were all, _Richie who?_ , and I thought—” Well. He’d thought kind of a lot of things, none of them good, about why she may not have wanted to talk to him or think of him or remember who he was, and none of them would be very nice things to say to her, to his friend Beverly sitting across the table from him with a tense, sad look on her face. “Well, anyway, now I know it was nothing personal, it was just the fear-monster that ate our brains. But it made me wonder — if you couldn’t remember Derry, what did you think happened with your dad for all those years.”

By the second half of Richie’s sentence, Bev is nodding along in agreement, though when she answers, her tone is a little distant. “I guess maybe it actually made more sense to me than to the rest of you? I thought it was the trauma. From the stuff with my dad. I thought that was why I didn’t remember anything before Portland, after a while.” The waitress drops by their table with the drinks and Bev leans forward in her seat, takes a long draft from the local pale ale she’s ordered, then goes on, “Sure fucked me up but good, though, not remembering my dad.”

Richie reflects that remembering probably wouldn’t have unfucked much about that, given what he now remembers about Al Marsh, but luckily, Bev barrels forward without giving him the chance to respond. “Because I knew what I said at my hearing, and I remembered knowing it to be true at the time, but later, when I couldn’t actually _remember_ any of the things I talked about happening, I — well. I doubted myself, I thought, you know, the only thing there was proof of was that I’d hit him, or hit him back, and I didn’t remember that, either, and I think— I think that’s part of why I never wanted to get to close to people I thought I could hurt. And that’s why I ended up with such shitty fucking taste in men.”

She sounds, Richie thinks, exactly like Beverly Marsh, the coolest girl in Derry who all the worst rumors are about, and who stares down trouble by looking it right in the face. Richie has never quite known how to respond right when she’s like this. He chuckles a little nervously, says, “Good for you getting it all out there before Haystack gets back, I think if he gets put in that category, he’ll cry,” Because Richie has never, actually, claimed to be that nice of a person. To shut himself up, he reaches for his own beer.

Bev looks like she’s considering several responses to that, but she settles on, “You really think he’ll come back?”

The thing is, somewhere inside Richie, where he hadn’t noticed himself deciding to think so, he really does, although objectively he’s not sure he’s got a leg to stand on. “We’re Losers,” Richie reminds her, reminds himself. “Stan showed up late, but he did show up now, in a weird way. And Bill and Mike are coming back, and if anyone has a reason to flee the state and not stop running, it’s Mike.”

Bev thinks about that for a minute, then says, “I probably shouldn’t have slept with Ben,” and Richie chokes on his beer.

“Excuse me?”

“Just because, you know, I don’t think I know what I want. Ben’s probably the best guy I’ve ever known, so it felt safe, but I wasn’t really thinking about his feelings, aside from the fact that he seemed pretty enthusiastic.”

“Present company excepted, of course.”

“What?”

“The best guy you’ve ever known, present company excepted.”

She cocks her head to one side, considering, then says, “Sure, of course,” and that could be the moment when they talk about it, but it isn’t.

After lunch, they drop by a thrift store that Bev remembers (“It’s been here since the ‘80s, the owner used to drive down to Boston and load up on cheap used clothes by the pound, then sell the good stuff here to pay for the trip,”) and pick up a few changes of clothes because, “If we live here now,” Richie admits, “I’m probably going to need a third shirt. Maybe even a sweater, too, if it keeps threatening to turn into Fall.”

Bev leans her head against his shoulder, says, “More than that, it’ll be winter before you know it. When’s the last time you spent the winter outside of L.A., Richie?”

“Oh, yeah, you know, the twenty-fifth of never, I have no idea how you got out of fucking _Maine_ only to move to the one place colder,” because Richie has had tours run through the midwest in winter and he wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Beverly shakes her head, says, “No, I love Chicago, it’s got none of the New England twisty-turns roads that double and triple back on themselves in the roundabout, roads no one has bothered to think through past whatever patch of mud was the most convenient for the first horse-and-cart tracks, Chicago is a city that makes _sense_ ,” and, “Kay says—” but then she cuts herself off.

“Who’s Kay?” Richie asks, because the sudden drift of silence demands it and also because he’s been wanting to know more about the people in Bev’s life since her moment of terrifying self-reflection over lunch.

“She’s my — my best friend,” Beverly stumbles over the description a little, and Richie can’t blame her — there are best friends and _best friends_ , and if he’d had anyone filling that description before re-remembering the Losers, he’s pretty sure he’d have to rethink his classification system a little with everything that’s happened since Mike’s phone call. Lucky for him, there’s been an empty space waiting where the Losers used to be for a long time now.

…

Richie thinks probably it would be appropriate if they were back at the creek for the dream-location of the next event, since the first thing Stan says, sighing and exasperated, is, “So, it’s a turtle.”

They’re not, though — they’re in the back row of their Sophomore history class, notable for being the only class in the entirety of their scholastic careers where Stan was known as a bigger trouble-maker than Richie, and also the site of Stan’s first-through-fifth and only detentions. It looks the same — the ragged textbooks that they picked up from the front of the classroom at the beginning of the period and then checked back in at the end like Mr. Falcone thought there was any danger of students stealing them away for a little extra American exceptionalism, the squeak of the chairs, the initials carved into the desks which grew thicker the further back into the classroom you got. Stan leans over to whisper to Richie, casting furtive glances to the front of the room, like this memory of their mustachioed teacher still has the power to threaten him with anything, and says, “Yeah, I was all ready to rearrange my theological understanding of the universe after the, you know. The monster clown. But I wasn’t expecting the monster clown’s natural — supernatural? — enemy to be a turtle.”

“Something you want to share with the class, Mr. Uris?” a half-remembered voice floats back from the front of the classroom.

“No, sir,” Stan says in his rapidly-becoming-more-familiar adult voice, incongruous coming from his teenage lips.

“Alright, let’s keep it that way,” Mr. Falcone says in nasal tones that sound exactly note-perfect, but Richie would have sworn up and down he’d forgotten completely. Yes, until recently, Richie had forgotten most parts of their shared adolescence completely, but this feels different. That forgetting had been the wiped-blank slate of clown magic, or, apparently, maybe turtle magic? But this forgetting feels like it ought to exist just because Richie hadn’t actually paid all that much attention in this class. It had been kind of funny to watch Stan get baited into fights with a polo-clad wrestling coach, but not important enough to have stood the test of time, Richie didn’t think. 

He leans over to Stan’s desk and hisses, “Hey, am I in your dream, or are you in mine?”

Stan goggles at him, disbelieving. “Does it matter?” he hisses back.

“Yeah, actually, since the last thing I heard, you were fucking dead, it kind of matters if I’m talking to you from inside your ghost dream,” Richie replies, losing track of his whispering as he gets more and more agitated. He’s still looking over at Stan, but from where it’s looming over his head, he can feel Mr. Falcone’s shadow falling on him.

“Mr. Tozier,” Mr. Falcone snaps, “Stay and talk to me after class.”

“But I have English next all the way on the other side of the building,” Richie hears himself whine in reply. Stan kicks him under the desk.

“That’s unfortunate, isn’t it?” Mr. Falcone answered, using more teeth than Richie thinks he’d had, way back when. “Maybe next time you’ll think of that before you speak.” Richie cuts a panicked glance in Stan’s direction, but Stan only shrugs.

“You see why I had to take myself off the board, now, right? IT got a foothold in my head, back the first time. You won’t ever be able to really get rid of IT until I’m gone, too, so I can take that slice of IT with me.”

“VE-RY clever, Stanley,” IT-Mr. Falcone booms from two — seven — twenty feet above their heads. “So smart and so noble, it’s almost sad, your friends are going to miss you _so much_.”

“But we did,” Richie insists to Stan, wild-eyed. “We did get rid of it, already, that was days ago!” Above his head, the clown that used to be their history teacher smiles wide and wider, stretching, until the skin in the middle starts to split, tearing along the forehead, nose, and upper lip.

Stanley grimaces like he used to when he’d make Richie quiz him with flashcards before a test and Richie had insisted on reading out all of the answers in a sports announcer voice — just lightly pained, not really horrified — and says, “Eh, kind of.”

“What does _that_ mean?” Richie has been worried about a lot of things for the last twelve hours or so, but not actually having killed IT hasn’t managed to make the list until right now.

“It means you _did_ , or, like, you will,” Stanley says, standing up from his desk, grabbing Richie’s arm, and pulling them to lean against the back wall of the classroom until it goes soft and malleable and swallows them up into the painted-cinderblock wall like it’s made of marshmallow, “But you haven’t yet. I told you,” Stan’s voice echoes all around Richie from the blank, semi-solid void of whiteness surrounding him and holding him suspended, somehow outside of any either need for gravity or absence from it, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

Somehow, Richie finds, he can actually speak enough to form a reply even though he’s fairly certain that, in this place, he no longer has a body. He says, “Yeah, but I thought I was just talking to, like, your ghost.”

Stan’s reply, when it comes, comes from everywhere and nowhere, and Richie would think he was breathing it in as much as hearing it, if breathing felt like something that could be done in this place. “Don’t be a dumbass, Richie. Ghosts aren’t real.”


	3. Other places

Eddie can’t stop thinking about the certainty in Beverly’s voice when she’d said it: “I need to get a divorce, probably.” The _probably_ should perhaps have made it sound more hesitant, but it hadn’t, her tone had been like iron, and Eddie, who had never managed to get the quaver out of his voice when he said those words, had sat there at the table in a certain amount of awe. And then he’d driven Bev and Richie away from the airport and into downtown Portland, to the Holiday Inn By The Bay, which was probably a lower standard than either of them — famous millionaires both, probably, Eddie reminded himself — were used to these days, but which Bev had apparently always wanted to stay in after sneaking into an event held in the hotel ballroom in high school. “And how often do you get to make your dreams come true in a good way?” she’d asked.

At the time, they’d all laughed, but in not-so-far-into-retrospect, Eddie can’t quite put his finger on why, besides the idea that they’ve all had so many of their fears come true, the last few days. A large chunk of Eddie’s lifetime of fears alone can probably be summed up by the massive puncture wound through the center of his body, and the hospital and recovery time he’s had to take, and will continue having to take moving forward. So there’s at least some irony to her statement.

Richie hadn’t stopped fidgeting the whole drive from the airport in to downtown Portland, cracking open and them closing the window again and again, and Eddie — Eddie is worried, okay?

 _Alright?_ he asks himself in his head, testing it out. _I’m worried about him, is that okay with you?_ Richie is his best friend — or one of them, or had been at one point — and deciding to move to Portland, Maine on a whim based on a dream, after less than an hour’s forethought, feels, to Eddie, not to be the actions of an emotionally stable or healthy person.

 _Oh yeah, like you’d know what that looks like_ , says the sneering voice in the back of his head which had, at one time, sounded like the health center worker in college who had accused him of hypochondria, but which has since evolved since to take on the tones of any number of people who have looked at Eddie’s list of concerns regarding the dangers and uncertainties involved in existing within the universe and said, _nope, not dealing with any of THAT_.

It’s this worry which had him calling Bill on his way out of town a few hours ago: Eddie may not be the most trustworthy person to determine whether or not a set of actions is normal and healthy, but Bill — well, Bill may not be, either, what with the — the — something about a carnival? A kid, a crowded fairground, something — anyway, Bill may not be the perfect picture of rationality, either, but he fakes it better. When they were kids, Eddie had always thought that, even with the stutter, Bill could probably have hung with the cool kids, if only he could have made himself seem more amused by casual schoolyard cruelty.

Bill had said he’d talk to Richie, but he hadn’t said what he would _say_ , and despite himself, as Eddie barrels ever closer to New York and ever-further from Boston, he finds himself fretting that maybe Richie is right. When he’s thinking about IT, Eddie has found that the details of the whole affair have started to get blurry. To Eddie, this feels like the mercy Richie said Stanley claimed it would be, but if it’s going to grow and spread, to start to take out the good things, and the neutral things, and the terrible-but-also-important things, then Eddie suspects he’s going to start to feel differently. None of this, he scolds himself, ultimately changes anything: he’d still have to go back to New York, even if he knew for sure the risks he’s taking. He owes Myra that, he thinks. When you make a promise to someone that you’ll stay with them forever, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t get to grow and change (or suddenly remember that you already did the growing and changing a half a lifetime ago, you just forgot), Eddie doesn’t think, or doesn’t think that he thinks, but it probably does mean that you owe them a conversation in person if it becomes time to break things off.

(Eddie does think he’s actually going to do it this time. He really, really does.)

Still, even if he’d be in this car, driving in this direction, whether Richie is right or wrong about the fact that doing so means that he’s also hurtling towards not remembering why his favorite people in the world matter to him, it occurs to him that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. If they were talking, over shitty airport coffee, about Mike and Bill remembering better _because they had each other to remind them_ , that implies that being reminded _helps_ , and Eddie can, maybe, induce some of that effect in himself, if he tries hard enough.

(Not trying hard enough has never been Eddie’s problem.)

Eddie has always been good at the mechanics of studying: careful notes, flash cards, detailed outlining — Eddie has always done it all, and done it in painstakingly neat, small print. In high school, he never had Richie’s memory and talent for winging it, and somehow, the fact that Stan has come to _Richie_ in a dream to tip him off, and the fact that Richie does not have a somewhat loved and long-resented wife to go back and explain to that, in fact, he’s never actually been the man she married, he doesn’t think, he just didn’t know it at the time — all of that is giving Eddie the visceral, emotional flashback to seeing Richie get a better score than him on a test he _knew_ Richie had not studied for.

Eddie thinks this, and then blinks to himself. He keeps getting tripped up by this, by the rush of memory of a shared life when he’d always thought he grew up alone, instead of joyously bouncing off a handful of close friends like pinballs, ricochetting off of each other into greater and greater heights of their own personalities, being together and being close to each other never making them more like each other so much as constantly making each of them more like themselves. It feels impossible that all these new bursts of remembering could be happening right alongside a weird, supernatural fade-out of those exact same memories, but a lot of impossible things have already happened this week, and Eddie has never loved taking chances.

Still, Eddie has always been good at studying. He’s pretty sure he can handle this. He fumbles sideways, one-handed, for his phone, and opens a new voice memo. “I met Bill first, the second day of kindergarten. I hadn’t gotten to go the first day because Mommy thought I was running a temperature, and so all the other kids already knew each other.”

He’s remembering it as he’s saying it, and leaving a record behind of these memories screaming to life from where they’ve been waiting in the back of his brain for all these years feels good, feels right.

…

Richie has never been an insomniac — his depression habits lean in the more-sleep direction much more often than the less-sleep — but sleeping on command is something else entirely. “It’s like trying to take a piss when the guy at the other urinal keeps sneaking looks and acting like he’s being subtle about it,” Richie explains to Bev, and she says, “But Rich, if a slice of Pennywise is still alive in your dreams,” and Richie says, “Stanley says that the Pennywise part is from _his_ dreams, actually,” and Beverly says, “But Stan’s _dead_ ,” and then both of them glare at each other like either one of them is fighting with each other instead of with the weirdness of the whole situation, and the Beverly breaks the stare to go digging through her purse.

“Making sure you’ve got a rubber in there just in case you decide you can’t sleep with me without _sleeping with me_?” Richie leers, and Bev looks up at him for a second. The innuendo is there, hanging between them, along with the question — _is this it? Is this when we talk about it?_ Richie shakes his head, once, hard, like trying to dislodge water from his ear after swimming, and the moment is broken.

“Gross,” Bev says, but hurriedly, dismissively, looking back down to where she’s digging through an inside pocket of the bag. After a moment, she emerges with a triumphant grin and a translucent orange prescription bottle which she waggles in her hand like she’s presenting it as a prize on Wheel of Fortune. “Got it — here, I swear, one of these, two tops, and you’ll be _out_.”

“Ms. Marsh,” Richie tells her, “I’m not that kind of girl,” but he’s already reaching for the bottle.

When he wakes up asleep, for a moment he’s in the white place again, but then it’s like he feels a sharp yank in the back of his brain, and then they’re in the clubhouse, and Stanley’s saying, “I think I fucked up, Rich,” and, preemptively “Just shut up for a minute, I actually have to tell you about the turtle this time."

“Like an actual turtle? Like Schmancy?”

Schmancy, Richie can see Stan remembering in a rush, right alongside his own rush of memories, had been Eddie’s pet, inasmuch as a limping box turtle rescued from schoolyard bullies by a nine-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak and then inexpertly but carefully nursed back to health could be called a pet. Schmancy had never gone home with Eddie, since Sonia would undoubtedly have turned her out of the house at the first whiff of her, and she’d been turned loose from their pre-clubhouse meeting spot in the Barrens as soon as Eddie had declared her healthy enough to go free.

Richie had named Schmancy (short for Fancy Schmancy) or, at least, had called her the same thing over and over again often enough that everyone else had started doing it too, which, Richie maintained to this day, was actually what naming was. He’d claimed, at the time, that this had meant that he was Schmancy’s other dad, to which Eddie had always said, “Ew, no, I’m not her dad, she’s a turtle,” and then gone on to explain for the hundredth time how turtles could give you listeria, and made Richie clean his hands again with yet another baby wipe, “Otherwise you’ll touch your face and give yourself a face-infection, numb-nuts.”

“No,” Stanley sighs. “Not like Schmancy, like — like, do you know how the ancient Egyptian goddess Bast was a lioness goddess? It’s like that, I think. Except that the turtle says that it came from space, like the clown, so not exactly like that, I guess. Unless I’m forgetting some important things about ancient Egyptian mythology.”

“Oh _no_ perish the thought,” Richie says, and “Obviously not, why would I know that?” He looks down at his hands and they’re small again, like they were when he’d helped Eddie hold Schmancy still while Eddie sponged the cuts from fishing hooks clean on her little turtle feet. He’s starting to get a sense for it — he tends to fall into the child’s body when he’s saying something especially snotty or immature — unless it’s that he’s more likely to say the snotty immature thing when he’s already in the child-body. It’s a turtle-or-the-egg question, he thinks, smiling to himself.

Stan snaps his fingers in front of Richie’s face, and Richie is tempted to snap into a faux-faint like Bill had, a few times, long-suffering and game, when six-year-old Richie had put together a magician routine for the talent show. “Focus, Rich,” Stan says, and, “I always knew there was a pretty good chance that the reality of death would rearrange my theological understanding, assuming death came with any sense of awareness, and didn’t just immediately dissolve any sense of self-ness, whether or not there was some form of afterlife, but the eternal cosmic battle between the eldritch space clown and the ethereal space turtle feels like a bit of a bridge too far.”

“But, wait—” getting things straight is, really, not Richie’s goal here, even assuming that goals are things he is in any way interested in manifesting at any point, but one part of what Stanley just said is hitting wrong in the back of his mind.

“I just hope my dad saw the same thing when he died,” Stanley is muttering, a vicious pleasure in his voice that strikes Richie, vaguely, as both hilarious and also kind of tragic.

“Stan the man — last time I was here. Not here, but in that white space beyond the dream? You told me you weren’t dead yet. Ghosts aren’t real, remember?”

Stanley smiles back at Richie, a glimmering, ironic little half-smile in the dim light of the clubhouse. “They’re not,” he says, and, “So I’m taking a little artistic license, maybe, so what?” and “I’m not dead yet, that’s true, but I’m definitely dy _ing_ , so I think it still counts.”

Richie is about to come up with a response to that, he really is, but it’s at that point that he leans up against the ladder leading in and out of the clubhouse, and Bev tumbles down the ladder right on top of him. The dream shudders around them, then holds. Richie notes this vaguely as his body crashes into the damp, packed earth of the clubhouse floor and his glasses jolt off his face and to the ground. Overhead, the mop of blurry red curls Richie parses as Beverly says, “I think I fucked up, Richie.”

“What?” Richie asks, cutting his blurry-eyed vision over to Stanley, confirming that he’s still there.

“It’s just, watching someone sleep is so _boring_ , and I think I may have nodded off.”

“Hi, Beverly,” dream-Stan says, a little bashfully. Bev jolts a little in surprise, then turns towards him.

“Stan!” she cries out, and the disbelief in her voice rankles at Richie, a little. Then she rushes over and catches Stan up in a hug, and Richie thinks _why didn’t I think of that?_ This is his third time hanging out with not-a-ghost dream Stan and he hasn’t so much as tried to pinch one of his little babyfaced cheeks, never mind gone in for the hug. To cover for his sudden uncomfortableness, Richie pulls himself to his feet, brushing the smear of dank dirt off his ass for some reason, despite the fact that he assumes that, whatever he does, the mess won’t outlast this dream.

“I told you it was him,” Richie tells Bev’s back, uselessly, as she hugs him tight. She hadn’t doubted Richie, when he told her, but he’d still felt like she probably should have, and so having her here, assuming it is actually her, rather than a projection of her coming out of either his or Stan’s subconscious, feels like some kind of vindication.

Stan says, “Actually, I think I’m the one who fucked up.”

He lets go of Bev, then steps back so he’s looking at both her and Richie, and says, “I promise, I just wanted to see you one last time. But you said — Rich, you said you already beat IT, where you are?”

Richie nods, feeling tension build behind the walls of his ribcage.

“Well, you haven’t yet where I am, but by talking to you, I think I tied when you are and when I am together, and that means — I’m worried that means that even though you already beat it when you are, the IT that’s in my head can get through to you from when I am.”

And that — that’s such a terrible thought that Richie blinks himself awake in shock.

…

“The first time, I saw the, uh — the leper first — fuck _off_ , asshole, where the hell did you learn how to drive?”

[the long, slow screech of a car horn screaming past]

“But, right. The leper. Shit, that’s just horribly fucking transparent, isn’t it? Guess no one’s really looking for artistic subtlety in their deep psychological fears, huh? And Bill saw — with Bill it was always about Georgie, and Bev had all that blood, I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I walked in that bathroom, and Mike had — had that bird thing, right? No, the — the tunnel? Was Mike in a tunnel? And Bowers was after him, but he was after all of us, too. And Richie didn’t see anything.”

…

For the second time that day, Bill Denbrough looks down dispassionately, watching a phone call from his wife ring through to voicemail instead of either answering or declining the call. Following Bill’s gaze with a quick glance away from the road in front of them and down at the phone in Bill’s lap, Mike says, “You know, you could always turn your phone off, or put it on airplane mode.”

Bill chuckles, once, an unamused sound, then says, “The problem is, I think, that I actually want to stay with her, I don’t actually want, you know, everything, to get in the way of my marriage.”

Mike lifts an eyebrow, but this time keeps his eyes fixed on the bumper of the car ahead of them. “Well, I don’t claim to know a lot about relationships, but if I was going to guess, I’d say picking up when she calls would probably be a step in the right direction.”

“Sure.” It’s not that Bill and Audra haven’t talked, in the days since everything went down in Derry — they have, twice, and they’ve tentatively agreed to wait to discuss things in more detail once they could talk in person. Bill had then immediately invited himself along on the first leg of Mike’s post-Derry, fuck-you, big-world-out-there road trip, thus prolonging the gap before that in-person conversation could or would happen indefinitely. “But, see, Mike, it’s the step after that which I think is going to be a problem.”

Mike shoots him a questioning glance.

“The step after that is either to lie to her, or to tell her the truth about what happened. And I don’t know that either of those options ends in any kind of functioning relationship.”

Mike nods to show his understanding, then says, “So you don’t think she would believe you?”

“Would you?”

“I do believe you, man. For obvious reasons, but I still don’t think that’s a useful hypothetical.”

Bill nods. “She’s always thought my books are a little ridiculous.”

Mike, who, Bill reminds himself, is a librarian by profession, adds a little tease to his grin and says, “Well, to be fair to her, they are a little ridiculous. The one with the zombie-virus through cell phones? Very ‘you kids get off my lawn.’”

“You say that now,” Bill says, mostly joking, a little not, “But next week if we end up driving through a town that’s been overrun by 4G zombies, I’m warning you now, I’m going to be so smug.”

Mike shrugs, returning to the previous conversation. “You know, marriages based on not acknowledging bad truths because they sound literally insane are what Derry’s built off of. Long and not-so-glorious tradition. But it’s up to you, man.”

“Yeah,” Bill agrees. “Up to me.” He turns the phone upside down against his pant leg to hide the missed-call notification. “Anyway, I can figure it out once we’ve gotten this Richie thing worked out. Or maybe I’ll forget all of it. That’d take the question out of my hands, anyway.”

…

“And then we — we killed IT? Somehow? And we could feel, right, we could just tell by doing it that it was different from last time, that it was _done_ , and that had better be fucking true because I — _shit_ , I can’t. Remember. How we did it.”

Eddie’s sitting in the driveway in front of the neat, overpriced suburban split-level he shares with Myra, and he has been for going on fifteen minutes now, but suddenly it feels significant. Before, he had to sit here, because before he went in to talk to her, he had to get to the end of the story, but now he’s _there_ — and he thumbs off the out-sized voice memo — and he’s got a record, such as it is, gaps and all, gaps growing the further down the road and deeper into the story he got, because, _goddamn it_ , it seems like Richie was right.

 _Richie_ , Eddie thinks, and in his mind’s eye he sees the chunky glasses, the eye-wateringly busy shirts, the uneven, laughing-at-himself smile at six and sixteen and just this morning. Eddie may be forget _ing_ , but he hasn’t forgotten yet. Not the important things. _Bill, Stan, and Richie, an entire childhood of them, and then Ben, Bev, and Mike, all tumbling into their lives in the same week, making them all fit together_.

Eddie nods to himself, suddenly resolute. Bev and Richie are back in Portland, and if Eddie knows Ben at all, he’ll be on a flight right back to them as soon as he gets Beverly’s call. Mike and Bill, too, probably. Stanley was there in Richie’s dream and maybe he’s not quite as gone as death means he ought to be, and now, Eddie’s got a mission. He’s got to get into that house, do what he has to do, and then turn right back around and drive back to Maine, of all places, before he has the chance to forget why it’s worth it to do so.

…

Ben checks Richie’s message as he’s getting off the plane, and when Beverly wrenches the phone out of Richie’s hands and starts talking, Ben almost turns right back around and immediately gets back on the plane he just exited. It’s a completely illogical urge, he knows, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling like the quickest possible way to get back to where they are, like pushing the rewind button on reality.

Instead, Ben belatedly realizes that the woman disembarking from the plane behind him is awkwardly trying to figure out the best way to shuffle her massive suitcase around him, and abruptly lurches forward up the remaining feet of the gangway, casting his gaze back at her apologetically. When he’s made his way to solid ground, he asks for directions to the airline’s help desk so he can see about booking another flight, then dials Beverly’s number.

He’s not quite sure what to expect when he does, but it’s certainly not a groggy “Goddamn it.”

“Did I wake you up? It’s only—” he looks pulls the phone away from his ear to check the time, then does some quick mental math, “Nine-thirty there, right? About?”

Bev yawns. “Yeah, sorry hon, it’s fine. It’s just that napping is our new hobby now, what with the Stan thing.”

“So Richie actually—” and here Ben finds himself lowering his voice a little. Literally no one in this crowded airport full of other people urgently bustling from one form of high-speed transportation to another in pursuit of their own unique destinies is looking his way, but it still feels like Stan is a subject which to be spoken of in private, in low voices. On the one hand, Ben hasn’t seen Stanley in over twenty years, but on the other, the newness of all those recently re-remembered memories means the last time he saw that serious young face looking up at him from across the study table in the library still feels recent and raw, not faded with age and distance like the memories of just before or just after Ben moved to Derry. “Richie actually talked to him? Stan?”

“We both did,” Bev confirms. “The, uh, IT showed up, for a minute, in Stan’s dream, one of the last times, and I was worried about Richie, so this last time, I hung out while he fell asleep, but then _I_ fell asleep, and then, _bam_ , I was there in Richie’s dream, and Stan was, too.”

“And you’re sure it was really Stan?” Ben can’t help but think of the version of Beverly that IT had tried to be, once, and how real it had felt — subtly _wrong_ , yes, but also so vivid and present and familiar.

“Yeah,” and there’s a smile in Bev’s voice as she says it. “Yeah, it was Stan. We’re gonna dope ourselves up on Benadryl, see if we can get back in there and talk to him soon. You should get back here, maybe we can bring you, too.

Part of Ben thinks this sounds — wild and reckless, like some part of this is wrong. He’d thought, when they all drove out of Derry, that they were heading towards some new kind of normalcy. Instead, this feels like the part where someone gets trapped in a fairy tale — you get the chance to get something back, someone you never thought you would see again, but in exchange, you have to take yourself outside of the real world. It sounds like a dangerous bargain, and more than that, it sounds like Richie and Beverly don’t know they’re making it.

The other part of him, though, the bit that panicked at the idea of losing his memories of these people again, doesn’t even question it. He nods to himself, then says to Bev, “Text me the address where you’re staying, I’ll get the next flight back that I can.”

…

Because it happened by accident the first time, Richie and Bev are fairly sure they should be able to both make contact with Stan again as soon as they try, but it turns out to not actually be that easy once they’re making an effort.

“There’s a metaphor in here somewhere,” Richie grouches, downing a cup of chamomile tea like it’s a shot.

“Do you think it’s because we’re trying to fall asleep at the same time, this time?” Bev asks.

“What?”

“Well, I fell asleep after you did, last time it worked. Maybe your dream, with Stan in it, had to be already established before I could get into it.

“We haven’t actually established whether we’ve been in Stan’s dream or mine,” Richie quibbles, but it’s still the best idea either of them have had, so he agrees to give it a try.

“It’s not so much a question of my dream or yours,” Stan says as Richie arrives, “So much as my dream and yours turning into the same dream, like when two soap bubbles bump into each other and turn into one soap bubble. At least, I think so. That’s what the turtle says.”

“Turtle?” Beverly asks, blinking into existence because, of course, Richie remembers, she hadn’t manifested last time until after he and Stan had already talked about Schmancy, and also, since they hadn’t really been friends with Bev yet, back when that happened, even if Richie tried to make a joke about it, she wouldn’t know what it meant.

He’s saved from inevitably trying to do it anyway by Stan, who says, “The turtle is kind of the opposite of the clown, I think.”

Bev, thirteen years old and manifesting a wall to lean back against insolently out of the blank space all around them, pops her gum and says, “So if the clown has an opposite, why is this the first we’re hearing about it?”

“‘The turtle couldn’t help us,’” Stan says, and as he says it, he sounds like he’s quoting something Richie should already know, although he can’t think what, “But I think it can, now. It said it’d help me fix the way I’ve fucked this up.”

He’s said this before, that he fucked up, but when Richie tries to think of why Stan thinks so, the memory slips away like the soap bubble Stan was talking about a minute ago, so he asks, “Fucked up how?”

“Fucked up by choosing a fuckup like you for my goodbye tour,” Stan says, and that could actually hurt, Richie thinks. If his feelings felt less distant and dreamlike, less far away from him, at this moment, he thinks he’d be upset by what Stan just said, but Stan is already continuing on, tone painfully gentle, “You were supposed to say goodbye and let me go, Rich. Then I’d go and take my piece of the clown with me. But since you won’t let yourself forget, it’s still here. Even though you beat it.”

Richie shakes his head, stubborn, because he’s right about this, he thinks. “It’s not _fair_ , the forgetting was one of the things that fucked us up so bad the first time, but we actually won, this time.” _We should get to keep each other_ , he thinks, but he stifles it because it sounds way too sappy, more childish than anything he let himself say when he was an actual child. Then he says it anyway, because watching what he says isn’t exactly his _brand_ , and also Stan is being unemotional enough about this for the both of them. “We should get to keep each other.”

Stanley’s face twists because, of course, Richie thinks, Stan has chosen not to keep the rest of them either way. Stan changes the subject, saying, “Well, anyway, I’m glad you two chuckleheads finally figured out that you have to fall asleep sequentially.”

Scrappy little teenage Bev punches adult Stan on the arm, and Richie, who refuses to look down at his own hands long enough to speculate about which body he’s wearing right now, scrunches up his brow in thought and asks, “Yeah, but why is that? I thought it was — like you said, the soap bubble thing. Why can’t all the dreams share their edges?”

Stan laughs. “Try to open up too many edges all at once, and all the bubbles just pop. You and I have to have a nice, stable, shared dream before Bev can open up the edges to bring her dream in, too.”

Richie nods like that makes any sense at all. “Dreams within dreams. Like _Inception_.” 

“No, Richie, not like _Inception_.”

“Are you sure? Because layering one person’s dream into another person’s dream sounds like we’re flirting with a copyright violation to me.”

“Obviously not like _Inception_ , _Inception_ is a clumsy allegory about the danger in cycles of grief and nostalgia.”

“Oh, and this isn’t?”

“My _brain_ is not an allegory, Richard,” Stan says.

“I’m pretty sure we’re in a turtle-magic dreamscape, not inside you physical, literal, meat-brain, Stanley,” Richie counters.

“Yeah,” Bev agrees, but Richie’s pretty sure she’s not invested in this argument he’s already warming up to at all, “Can we talk about this turtle? Why is it talking to you and not to us? No offense, Stan, but we’re the ones who actually fought the clown, this time.”

“Will fight,” Stan corrects absently, like it’s her grammar and not her relative temporal location which is in question. “And I don’t know, I think it’s because the turtle is outside of the world. Like IT’s supposed to be. So I can talk to it, because I’m the one touching death.”

He sounds so calm and matter-of-fact about it that Richie wants to cry. Stan asks Beverly, “Why are you helping Richie do this? You’re both fucking everything up, you need to let go of me.”

Bev shakes her head. “That’s not just up to you, you know. And it’s not up to the turtle, either, whatever it is. And it’s not just me and Rich, the others are all coming back, too.”

“They’re what?”

“You didn’t think I was just not going to tell them?” Richie asks, and Stan shakes his head.

“I shouldn’t have. You never could keep a secret from Eddie to save your life.”

Richie’s not touching that one with a ten-foot pole, but he does say, “Yeah, and it’s their lives, too.”

“Yes, Richie,” Stanley says, looking down into Richie’s eyes, and he guesses that answers _that_ question, Stanley is glaring down at him as a grown man, and Richie’s just gangling there uselessly like the awkward adolescent he had been the last time they saw each other in person. “It _is_ their lives. Their lives — your life, too — are going to be in danger if you can’t let this go.” Stan chuckles self-deprecatingly. “Trust me, man, you do not want this thing in your head, look what happens.”

 _That_ hits, it hits Richie in the guts to think of Stan coming into these memories alone, having IT climbing around inside his brain until he decides it’s time to climb out of it. He tries not to let the shakiness he’s feeling show, tells Stan, “It’s their _lives_ , it’s our lives, we should get a say.”

After a moment, Stan nods. “They’re coming, you said?” At Beverly’s nod of confirmation, he agrees, slowly, “I guess you’re right, I guess you should all get a say. You’ll bring them in here so I can explain? But if they all see sense, if they’re willing to forget, to kill the clown for good, you have to let them, Rich. Promise me, if the group decides to let go, you have to let go with them, or you’ll all be screwed.”

It’s the last thing in the world Richie wants to agree to, but he can’t imagine that Ben and his moony eyes, who carried Beverly’s name in his wallet all these years without even remembering her, that Mike who never forgot to begin with, who’d lose pretty much a whole life if he lost those memories, that Bill would ever let himself lose Georgie’s memory twice. Richie thinks of Eddie’s stubborn-set jaw, and how he’s never seen Eddie Kaspbrak let anything go easily in his life. “Yeah, okay,” Richie agrees. “I’ll go with the majority, but I think you’re remembering them wrong if you think they’ll take the easy way and forget, Stan.”

…

In a moment of bizarre good timing, Richie doesn’t call until thirty seconds after Eddie has slammed the car door shut behind him. Eddie still doesn’t answer it right away, even though he knows he has a missed call from Richie earlier, from the drive down, but once he’s pulled out of the cul-de-sac, down past the little suburban downtown mall area, then out onto the highway, he calls Richie back.

“I heard you told on me to Bill,” Richie opens with, and Eddie sighs, surprised to find how unsurprised he is to hear it. Bill has never really had a talent for subtlety, and Eddie had asked Bill to figure out whether they should be worried — of course he’d approached that task by asking Richie the question directly. Bill charges at things like — like Eddie can’t quite remember, but he’s got his voice memo, so he can check it later.

For now, he tells Richie, “You already knew I was worried about you, choosing to stay in Maine after — after all that, you’ve got to know that sounds crazy.”

“After all what, Eds?” Richie asks, and he sounds absurdly, annoyingly tentative. What’s worse is that Eddie knows he’s about to prove him right.

“You _know_ what,” Eddie snaps, teasing carefully at the bruised edges around the dark, empty place that’s been expanding in the middle of his mind.

“I do know,” Richie agrees.

“Oh, _fuck_ y—”

“Fuck me, yeah,” he agrees yet again, and, “So is this it, then?”

“ _No_ , this is not _it_ ,” Eddie shoots back, as furious about the fact that Richie can read him well enough to know he’s already pointing his crumple-sided car back in the direction of the state he just left as he is that any of this bullshit is necessary. Haven’t they done enough? Eddie can’t remember what that was, but he’s so _fucking_ tired, he’s sure they ought to have earned a rest by now. He sighs, “I’ll be back by morning, okay?”


	4. Sometimes dreams aren’t places after all (sometimes places are Georgia)

The turtle says, “I’m sorry to have had to leave you to fix what I had a part in breaking long before you even began to exist. I could see it but I couldn’t touch it — you know what they say, _not dead only dreaming_.”

“I’m pretty sure no one has ever said that,” Stan says. Richie thinks Stan is the most comfortable of all of them talking back to the turtle god because he’s been trying to talk to it the longest — there’s a sense of familiarity there. Still, it might also be because Stan is about to die, and has been about to, right on the edge, for days and days of dreaming. Richie imagines there’s a certain amount of who-gives-a-fuckery inherent in that state of being.

“Well, maybe it’s just me,” the turtle says, not from its mouth but from everywhere, all around them. “But while I’m sorry, it’s also the normal way of things, isn’t it? Children always end up mopping up their parents’ mistakes, it’s the natural result of all the decisions parents make for them while children are still becoming.”

Eddie, who is somehow managing to lurk in a corner despite the fact that they are in a space which has neither walls nor edges, snorts. “Are you saying that we’re all your children?” he asks, and Richie reflects that it’s also not a surprise that Eddie also feels up for talking back to an incomprehensible cosmic force. The only person Eddie has ever had trouble talking back to was his mother, and even with her — a strange, half-memory swims into Richie’s mind of visiting Eddie in the hospital after he broke his arm, even though seconds before, Richie would have sworn that none of them saw Eddie between the time when his mother picked him up after he broke his arm and the next time they all descended into the depths of Niebolt. At the hospital, where Richie may or may not have visited him, Eddie had been hard-eyed and certain, and Sonia had cried and muttered all of her usual complaints about everything Richie did or was, but Eddie hadn’t paid her any mind.

 _But did it happen?_ Richie asks himself, digging desperately back through his own memories, the ones he’s been holding onto with his fingertips, at some points. _Doesn’t matter,_ something in him but not of him replies. _Whether he did it or not this time around, it’s still something that is true about him, it still lives in his potential, and you have always known it_.

 _Thanks, turtle-god_ , Richie thinks back, unsure even within his own mind about his sincerity versus sarcasm.

To Eddie, out loud, the turtle twinkles back, says, “Of course not. I’m a turtle.”

Richie’s pretty sure it’s not a joke, but he laughs anyway. _Turtle-god gets off a good one!_ rings through the back of his mind in his own pubescent voice, and he cuts a glance sideways to Stan, trying to find someone to share the joke with.

Stan, though — Stan is there, but he looks flickery in a way he never has in the dreams before, and when Richie meets his eyes, Stan’s gaze is old, and it’s sad, too. Stan tells the turtle, “I got them here for you, so you can help them fix it this time, right? I know it’s me that fucked up, but I just wanted to say goodbye, they already [fixed it/are going to fix it], don’t let me be the reason a bit of IT gets through again at the end.”

He says it just like that, too — words, but not words, punctuated in print to catch the multiple potentials, like if Richie really focused, he could see it diagramed out in the air, but not in letters, not in any visual indicator that Richie knows — or knows that he knows, anyway.

The turtle says, “Yes, you brought them together, and all of you are stronger together,” and “But I’m still just the conduit, it’s all of you who are the electricity,” and “You know electricity is dangerous in the bath,” and Richie looks down from Stanley’s sad, sad eyes to where he can see the blood on Stanley’s wrists just starting to seep through like a long, slow drip of water on old paper.

Richie reaches for Stan’s shoulder, the first time he’s touched him since he said goodbye when they were both sixteen and standing by the creek, skipping rocks, or failing to skip rocks, and Richie remembers it so clearly he can smell the fetid creek water, but the water he can feel on Stan’s shoulder, growing wetter the tighter he holds on, is warm, it’s bathwater. From a million miles away, Richie can hear Eddie demand, “Where are they going? Bring them _back_ ,” and the turtle saying, “No one can stay unstuck in time forever, not even me,” and “They’ll be back, they’ll just take the long way ‘round this time,” and, closer, right in Richie’s ear, “There are no rules for shit like this, but try to avoid stepping on your own toes, if you can,” and then Richie Tozier blinks awake, and he’s one of two grown men jammed into a lukewarm bathtub in Georgia that’s slowly filling up with blood.

…

Richie clumsily scrambles his way out of the tub over adult Stan who does look exactly like he has in Richie’s dream only much paler and iller and more dying, knocking over soap bottles and a water glass on his way and causing enough of a commotion that, even before he reaches the door, Stan’s wife, who Richie was only vaguely aware existed, is banging on the door and asking Stanley what’s wrong in increasingly panicked tones.

“Call 9-1-1,” Richie yells back, fumbling open the lock on the door with slippery hands.

“Who the hell are you?” The woman on the other side of the door demands, but when Richie gets the door open, she’s got her phone held up to her face, and she lets out a wild sob that’s almost a yell when her eyes fix on Stan in the tub behind Richie, but when the emergency operator asks what the emergency is, she answers coherently, shoving her way past Richie to get to Stan’s side.

By the time the paramedics get there, they’ve established that Richie can’t have gotten in the bathroom window, which is one foot by one foot, only opens halfway, and is four stories up, and there’s no logical way Richie could have gotten there; that he could explain what’s going on but Stan’s wife isn’t going to listen to him or care while her husband is bleeding out; that she also doesn’t particularly care to call the cops on Richie for his completely incomprehensible presence; that Stan is unconscious and can’t help to explain anything, but he is, so far, breathing.

When the paramedics do arrive, Richie numbly follows along after them alongside Stan’s wife, but when she gets in the ambulance, they stop him from following, telling him, kindly, that he can meet Patty at the hospital, which is how Richie learns Stan’s wife’s name. She meets his eyes and Richie is pretty sure they’re both feeling pretty lost. Richie obviously doesn’t have his phone, or wallet, or access to a car here in, presumably, Georgia, which is where Mike said Stan lived, so he doesn’t have a way to follow Patty to the hospital, even assuming she has any interest in his doing so, which Richie doubts. He waves sort of ineffectually at her and tells her, “I’ll just, uh. Wait here. We’ll talk later.”

Patty raises her eyebrows at him but doesn’t argue, and the ambulance door closes behind her. Richie looks around the otherwise quiet, evening-dark street, and thinks that it really is inconvenient that he’s not in the habit of sleeping with his wallet on him, or his glasses. Or, like, shoes. He settles down on Stan and Patty’s front stoop, and he waits.

…

Richie blinks awake hours later in the gray, pre-dawn light, and notes that he is still in Georgia, presumably still back in time from when he was yesterday — or in the future? He’d vaguely wondered, as he was dropping off, if falling asleep again would break the spell and send him back where — when? — he belonged, but apparently not. He wriggles stiff, icy toes and rubs the sleep-grit out of his eyes, leaning forward to rest his elbows against his knees, and then, without really deciding to or noticing, dozes off again.

When he blinks awake next, the sun is shining, and Richie is looking down at the pavement in front of him, where a pair of sensible, neatly-kept white sneakers are lined up in front of him. He raises his eyes, and Stan’s wife Patty is looking down at him already, so after a moment, their eyes meet.

She clears her throat a little awkwardly and says, “He’s alive, if that’s what you stayed to hear,” and Richie gasps like he hasn’t been breathing and just got shocked back into functioning, even though, to the best of his knowledge, he’s been breathing just fine up until that point.

“Good,” Richie says once he can say things again, and Patty smiles, an exhausted, luminous thing, and says, “So I guess that means you didn’t try to kill him and make it look like a suicide, then.”

“No,” Richie says, and he has no idea what his tone is doing right now, but this is the second murder he’s been accused of in — well, in some recent amount of time he’s not existentially capable of calculating at this moment, and since it’s the one that he did not commit, there will be some irony if it ends up being the one he goes down for. “No, he — he did that before I, uh. Got there.” Then he stops, because there’s really no good and believable way to tell her any more than that, and if they’re going to get into the unbelievable, Richie feels, possibly completely illogically, that it should be Stan who tells her.

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other and agrees, “Yeah, that — that’s what he told me. They’re holding him. For a day or two.”

“I guess that’s good?” Richie doesn’t know the etiquette for this situation.

Patty nods absently, and Richie wonders if she knows how she feels about it, either. “I didn’t climb through your window, either,” Richie tells her, just in case she’s rethinking the possibility of a B&E charge.

She looks him up and down, glances up the sheer side of the building up to her own apartment window, and says, “Yeah, I don’t see you having the upper-body strength to pull that off,” and, “Hey, are you that comedian?”

…

For perfectly reasonable reasons, Patty doesn’t feel up for inviting Richie, a stranger, back into her apartment alone, or for dealing with the macabre mess that is her bathroom.

“I can help you clean it up,” Richie offers. “Not now, you know, but later, when you’ve decided I’m not a creep. I’ve got practice with blood-spattered bathrooms.”

“Hot tip, hon,” Patty tells him, leading him in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, “But when you want someone to believe you’re not a creep, don’t, uh, tell people that.”

Moments later, Richie sits in the sunshine at a metal table in front of Starbucks with a whipped-cream covered monstrosity in front of him, letting the warm unreality of exhaustion pulse through his body, and tells Patty, “I know this is, like, juvenile and probably misogynistic, but I haven’t seen Stan since we were sixteen and he _scored_ when he ended up with you, I feel like I should high-five him.”

Patty smiles. “Since I’m getting the sense that you spent the entire night out on my stoop, and that kind of lack of sleep can do a number on anyone’s filter, I’ll let it pass.”

“It’s nice of you to assume I have a filter to begin with,” Richie tells her, and “Thanks for the smoothie.”

“That’s a frappe,” Patty says, and “So what do you mean you haven’t seen Stanley since you were sixteen?”

“It’s still a smoothie,” Richie says, slurping up a mouthful big enough to have him flirting with brain freeze. “Just, like, a coffee smoothie,” he finishes around his mouthful.

Patty smiles blandly at him and goes on, “And how did you go from sixteen to appearing out of thin air in his bathroom just as he was trying to — to hurt himself?”

“That’s, uh. That’s hard to explain.”

Patty smiles wider, seems less and less amused. “I’ve got nothing but time,” she tells him.

Richie takes another slug of his coffee smoothie, takes a deep breath, and tries, “Okay, so the town we’re from has something wrong with it.”

…

It doesn’t take a lot for Patty to start to cry, when the phone number Richie recognizes as Bev’s pops up on her phone. Stan was doing a lot better, when Patty went in to visit him earlier that day, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a fairly hellish week for her. 

Earlier in the day, Richie had tried desperately to remember what he’d heard of Bev’s conversation with Patty, what Bev said about it later. _Try to avoid stepping on your own toes_ , the turtle says in the back of Richie’s mind, but Richie can’t make it all happen the way it happened before if he doesn’t know what that _was_ , so he reminds Patty that he and Bev and everyone definitely thought that Stan was dead, the last time, and then he sits back and lets her say whatever she wants. The horror of losing Stan is what’s going to reach the other version of him who’s presumably on the other end of the line, whether Patty’s phrasing is different this time around or not. Vaguely, Richie wonders if it’s different at all, or if, had he had the ability to zoom out from the world far enough to see it the first time, he would have seen Patty, exhausted and sad but not devastated, standing beside a second Richie.

…

Richie offers to stay in the car when they drive to pick Stan up to take him home. “Or, you know, I could just hang out here. Give you love-birds some privacy.”

Patty shakes her head, says, “I need to see him see you to see if I’ve been letting some weird rando sleep on my couch.” She smiles like she’s joking, but she’s also kind of not.

When they arrive: “So you’re still here,” Stan says, and Richie nods, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets and slouching.

“Yeah. Do you remember—?”

“I remember everything,” Stan says, which, Richie could have told him, doesn’t actually mean much, because he might _think_ he remembers everything, but just not remember some of the things he’s not remembering. That thousand-yard-stare, though, makes Richie think that yeah, he probably does actually remember everything.

“Well, I’m glad you dropped by, man, I’m glad you told me we were about to forget, I’m glad — I’m glad I got to see you again. Like, alive.”

Stan smiles, crooked and wan, but he asks, “So, if you’re here does that mean you’re not there?”

“Nah, man, I called myself, I was right in the airport where I was supposed to be. I even remembered getting that weird hangup that I wouldn’t even have answered if the Mike thing hadn’t happened so recently.”

“So right now there are…”

“Two of me, yeah.”

Stan puts a despairing hand over his eyes, then reaches for Patty and says, “C’mere babylove, I need something in this world to make sense.”

…

Richie counts the days, but the numbers seem to squiggle, his understanding of how many days need to pass until he loops around to when he slipped backwards through Stan’s dreams feels fuzzy and malleable, and he thinks he might have ended up missing it, except that, the night before, the turtle shows up in his dreams again.

 _I have a name, you know_ , the turtle says, but Richie doesn’t think that knowing The Name Of God is really his jam, so he doesn’t ask. Instead, he says, “So, do we get to keep our memories now?”

 _You promised Stanley you would go with the group decision_ the turtle says, or emanates into the air around Richie. _I don’t see a group here._

“So is that you telling me it’s time to take the Urises on a road trip to Portland?”

The turtle — isn’t really there, physically, Richie doesn’t think, and is therefor not really visible, technically, but Richie still gets the sense of the turtle blinking serenely at him. _I didn’t think you were the type to balk at a road trip, Richie._

“I’m not objecting, I’m just clarifying,” he clarifies out loud to the empty room, suddenly uncertain whether he’s dreaming at all, or whether he’s just talking out loud to a disembodied voice from his fully awake spot on Stan and Patty’s pull-out couch.

 _Good,_ the turtle says, and then, _Stanley was right, you know — talking to him again made a loop, he came close enough to death that my brother was purged from his dreams in the attempt, but in the process of saying goodbye to you, he let a splinter get passed along_.

“I’m, sorry, your fucking _what_?” Richie asks, and this time he knows it’s out loud — even if he’s asleep, he’s sure the emphatic horror in his voice is strong enough to pierce the sleep paralysis and make it out of his mouth, dreaming or not. “Your _brother_?”

 _I wouldn’t worry about it,_ the turtle tells him, voice once again serene. _You are all strongest together, in any case, and the journey you will make tomorrow will bring you all together in the physical world for the first time since the last time, which will complete your power._

“Tomorrow?” Richie asks.

 _Tomorrow,_ the turtle agrees. _I would advise leaving early to avoid traffic on I-95._

…

“Stanley, Patricia, I arise bearing tidings.”

“What the hell, Rich,” Stan says, and Richie does his best to channel the turtle god’s attitude and smile beatifically.

“I have been the conduit for strange and mysterious things,” Richie says, and then, “The turtle god says I get shotgun when we drive to Portland today. It also says we have to drive to Portland today.”


	5. Where dreams go to die (stop dreaming and start living with this 30-day guarantee!)

It’s been a few days — or it hasn’t, as the case may be, but Richie has lived several days since he lived the day when he slept in the hotel room in Portland, so once he and the Urises have parked and they’re heading up the walkway and into the lobby, Richie touches Patty’s arm and says, “Hey, give me your phone.”

She does, smiling bemusedly and saying, “It’ll be strange to have it all to myself again, after this,” which — yes, Richie has maybe borrowed her phone several times as day for the last few days, as they’ve waited out the time loop until they could make it back to Portland and the point where there started — would start — to be two Richies, at least based on Richie’s personal timeline. Richie wonders, vaguely, if there would also have been two of Richie’s phones, if he’d happened to have his phone in his pocket when he time-travelled, and, if so, if he would have been billed for service twice over. He thumbs down through Patty’s recent calls until he locates Beverly’s number, from when she’d called from the parking lot of the restaurant to find out Stan was dead.

The phone rings, and then it rings some more, and then it rings again after that, and “Pick the hell up, Beverly,” Richie mutters, but she doesn’t, and eventually the ringing clicks over to her voicemail message. “I don’t _think_ so,” Richie tells the phone, hanging up as the beep screeches.

“Any other ideas?” Patty asks brightly, but Richie just shakes his head and dials again.

This time, Bev picks up, just when he’s just about sure he’s about to get prompted to leave another voicemail. Her voice is controlled, but Richie thinks he knows her kind of panicked tone again by now, even if it has changed a little since she was thirteen. She says, “Hi, Patricia, I’m so glad you called, but I can’t quite really talk right now, can I call you back?”

“Hey Marsh, what’s our room number again?” Richie asks. He thinks the best way to get to the bottom of this is probably just to bring Stan and Patty up so they can all talk things through in person, not least because he has no idea how he’s going to explain any of it to any of them.

…

It’s good, of course, to see Bev, and strange to see all of the rest of them, looking pretty much exactly as Richie left them, which makes sense, since for them it’s only been a few minutes, he’s pretty sure. It’s _strange_ to look over Bev’s shoulder and see _himself_ asleep on the bed, so he can hardly blame Bev or Bill or Mike or — well, any of them — for the double-take they give him as he stands there in the doorway.

It’s a weird, charged silence, but after a moment Stan steps from the hallway where he’s been standing to a space in the doorway just behind Richie’s shoulder, and that breaks it, because Bev gasps, and Bill makes a noise that might be a sob, and Mike grabs Bill’s shoulder like he thinks he might fall over with the shock of it, and Eddie darts forward and Richie is sure — is _sure_ — that Eddie is going to grab Stan in one of those fitfully-tight, fierce and uncertain hugs of his, so he can verify for himself that Stan is real, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he whacks Richie on the arm and says, “You _asshole_ ,” and while mild physical and verbal aggression are both pretty standard fare with Eddie, for some reason, in this moment, Richie is not expecting it.

He rubs at the spot on his arm, which is more tingly than sore, but _still_ — and asks, “Hey, what did I do?”

“You—you—you could have _told_ us that you were bringing Stan back from the _dead_ when you called to tell Bev you were here,” he says after a moment of trying to start a sentence that sounds more like a motor stalling than like Bill’s erstwhile stutter. Then he falls silent, darting his eyes back and forth between Richie and Stan, and his voice goes a little bit more tentative as he asks, “That is — that’s really Stan, right? Alive?”

He asks Richie, but his gaze keeps darting back to Stanley, which, honestly, Richie can’t blame him for. Since Stan has been out of the hospital, Richie has had the hardest time looking away from him, too. Richie was _there_ , he’s the one who materialized into a bloody bathtub, moved through time and space by something he doesn’t understand but has felt beneath his hands enough that it should be impossible to disbelieve, and it still feels more like a dream than his actual dreams lately — Stan, here, alive, completing the set of them to be here and alive after the shit-show down in the Derry sewers.

Richie waits for Stan to break in — he hasn’t been shy about speaking up in the dreamscape, so Richie’s not sure why he’d get quiet now — but when he doesn’t, Richie clears his throat and says, “Yeah, he’s really alive. He’s really Stan.”

There’s another long pause, and then Patty — thank the turtle god for Patty, Richie’s new best friend — leans in around the doorway and says, “And I’m really Patty, it’s nice to meet you all.”

Richie looks over at her just soon enough to see her looking into the room, taking in the ring of faces, and then noticing the other Richie, sleeping body lying on the bed. She looks up at where Richie is also standing next to her, and says, “Is that, uh—?”

“Don’t worry, that’s just my sleeping body, it’s not dead or anything,” Richie tells her, before realizing he’s just assuming that on no real evidence. He cuts his gaze back to Bev, his partner in sleep-crime, and asks, “Right? I’m just asleep? I’m not here just in time to dispose of another body and this time it’s my own?”

“No, yeah, it’s—” Bev looks like she doesn’t quite know how to respond to the abundance of Richies any better than Richie does, which is kind of reassuring, Richie guesses. “You’re just asleep, or you were a minute ago. We couldn’t wake you up, Rich, we’ve been starting to get worried.”

“Yeah, I’ve been, uh, kind of busy elsewhere,” Richie says, indicating Stan and Patty with his thumb, and Patty takes that as her cue to ask, “Should we — uh. Should we take this inside?” She jerks her eyes back to where the second Richie is asleep on the bed. “I don’t know how we’d explain all this, if someone were to walk by.”

“We’d say it’s my evil twin, of course,” Richie tells her, but he takes the hint and walks the rest of the way into the hotel room, anyway.

…

“So the thing we’ve got to decide,” Stan concludes their summary of his and Richie’s version of the last few days while the rest of them were by turns fighting a sewer clown, getting various emergency surgeries to recover from injuries sustained fighting a sewer clown, hiding a body, and otherwise doing the necessary cover-up to make sure none of them went down for the sewer clown’s crimes, “Is whether we’re going to remember it all, or whether we’re going to let go of it to go back to our regular lives.”

“Actually,” Bill says, “I think the most pressing thing we’ve got to deal with is the two Richies problem.” He turns to face Richie, expression serious, and says, “I think you’ve probably got to shoot him. The other you. You can’t both go back to your life, I think you have to let go of him, I think you have to take him out.”

Richie has a response to that, he does, and that response is, “What the _fuck_ , Bill.” It’s a good response, it’s a question that needs to be asked, and he stands by it.

Bill says, “You can definitely do it — he’s asleep, he’s not going to fight back.”

“How much additional psychological damage have you inflicted on yourself just by writing your own books?” Richie asks. He knows it’s a dangerous game, bringing the interplay of personal psyche and professional creative work into the conversation, but in this case, he thinks the drasticness of the measure is called for.

“Well, what are you going to do, Richie?” Bill asks, waspish, “Wake him up and bring him to auditions with you? Make it your party trick, _Hey look, there’s two of me_?”

“Maybe,” Richie says, a little stung by the dismissiveness. “I’ll have you know I haven’t had to audition for anything in years, okay, but yeah, maybe I will just wake him up and let him loose on the world. Send him out to take over my life, see if he does any better with it.”

“I think, if we choose to forget,” Stan breaks in, persistent as a dog with a bone about this idea of erasing the entirety of their shared childhood from his memory-banks again, “That the turtle would take care of it. The other Richie.”

“Well, we’re not doing that,” Bev says, “So we’re going to have to come up with another plan.” When Stan looks like he’s going to argue, she goes on, “And us not forgetting is why you’re still here, so I’d think you’d be a little more open to the idea, Stanley.”

She’s a little brusque about it, and while Richie basically agrees with the sentiment, he doesn’t enjoy the wavering, uncertain look on Stan’s face that shows up in its wake. It’s that, that wave of something almost protective, that has him temporizing, “Okay, yeah, but slow down there, killer. We promised, remember? Or I did,” because even these supernatural dreams, these gifts from an alternate dimension, have that slippery, hard-to-pin-down dream quality in his memory that means that he can remember making the promise, and he can remember Beverly being there in the dreams, but he can’t quite remember whether these things happened at the same time. 

“I promised we’d vote on it, I promised I’d go with the group. And I think that’s right.” Richie has never been much of a team player, always the person you least want by your side in a group project, but he thinks there’s something true about this. “Either we should all remember or we should all forget, so I think we should all promise to go with the majority, on this one.”

He looks around the circle that the group of them have made, clustered on the other double bed in the room, not the one the other Richie is snoring faintly on. Eddie is nodding, Mike has been pretty quiet through all of this, Bill still looks kind of peevish from their disagreement, and Ben is fitfully cracking his knuckles, but one by one, they all agree, Even Bev, till they’re left with Stan, the one who proposed this promise to begin with, and who nods reluctantly — probably, Richie thinks, because he’s realizing he’s about to be overruled.

“So,” Richie says, “I think we’ve pretty well established that Bev and I are voting for keeping our memories. Mike?”

Richie is pretty sure about this one, too, not least because he thinks if Mike loses his memories of Derry, he’s not sure what Mike will be left with. Still, it’s a relief when Mike looks a little sadly over at Stan and says, “I — uh, yeah. Being remembered by you all — that’s one of the things I was fighting for. I’m not ready to let it go forever.”

At Mike’s side, Richie notices that Bill reaches down to wrap a hand around his wrist, at that, so Richie isn’t surprised when Bill says, “I want to remember, too,” and then, with a ghost of a smile, “I think I’ve been living like I remember the whole time, it’d be nice to know why I was doing that.”

And that’s all they need, really, that’s four, that’s a majority of the lucky seven, but Richie’s eyes still travel to the next person in the circle, and there’s Ben with his horribly gorgeous, big worried eyes fixed on Stanley, saying, “I want—I’ve always wanted to remember, but Stan — Stan, man if you can’t live like this, I—I know we said we’d all go with the group, but if you need to let go, I don’t mind—”

And that’s a point, a good one, the kind of good point that only a really good person would make, and Richie’s never been sure if he qualifies, as a good person, but he finds himself nodding along, anyway, and he knows he’s not the only one. The look that appears on Stan’s face in response is an awful one, Richie looks at him and thinks he wants to take back every part of this awful day, but Stan steels himself, after a moment, and says, “I did it for a reason, you know. I wanted to take — I wanted to take the part of IT that was a part of me out of the world. But,” and here he looks over at Richie, who is already staring right at him, and their eyes lock, “But that piece — that splinter, it’s not in me, anymore. It was in my dreams, but then my dreams were also Richie’s dreams—”

Richie has, theoretically, known this, or kind of known it, for days. That doesn’t make it any easier to hear, as Stan finishes, “So taking me off the board won’t help anymore. That’s why we have to forget,” he says, eyes still locked on Richie’s. “If we don’t want to let a piece of IT back into the world when you’ve already killed IT, we’ve got to get it out of Richie’s head.”

There’s another solution to that one, Richie thinks, though his own thoughts suddenly feel very far away from his body. It’s an obvious solution because it was Stan’s, and because, as far as they know, before Richie flung his body through time and messed with things, it worked. “Taking you off of the board won’t work anymore,” Richie says it because he knows, knows it from the terrible look on Stan’s face, that Stanley won’t. “Taking you off the board don’t work because I’ve got the hot potato. So either I’ve got to forget, or I’ve got to — you know. Take your way out. Die.”

He knows it’s not going to be a popular statement, but the hubbub of response he gets from the rest of the Losers in reply is emphatic and loud and offended enough that he’s hard-pressed to pick out a single specific voice of opposition over the cacophony until Big Bill raises his hand like he’s back in high school again, and, when the rest of them quiet, says, “It’s like I _said_. You’ve got to shoot your double.”

“ _What?_ ” This time it’s Eddie who objects, which is good because Richie is pretty sure he can’t, in this situation, not if he’s going to maintain his position that he’s probably going to have to be the reluctant sacrifice in this scenario. Still, it’s good for _someone_ to object to the matter-of-fact way that Bill keeps proposing this utterly batshit solution.

But Bill barrels on, “See, it’s better than Stan, because we’ve got a spare Richie on hand. We’ve got to kill one of them so he can take the piece of Pennywise out of the world with him, but then we’ve still got a Richie left over, after.”

When he puts it like that, there’s a certain amount of mathematical sense to it. Richie still thinks Bill is wrong, but he also thinks if he points out the plot-holes in this theory, they’ll move on to other proposed solutions that don’t involve a Richie-sacrifice, and while, in theory, Richie would like for one of those to exist, he’s getting the sinking feeling that there isn’t going to be one. So instead of pointing out that while there appear to be two physical Richies in the room, only one of them appears to have any consciousness, and it’s the conscious one which has the piece of the clown-monster lodged in his subconscious, Richie says, “Well, you heard the man. Anyone got a gun?”

The answer to that question, as Richie suspected, turns out to be ‘no.’ And while no one has technically signed on to the shooting-Richie’s-double plan — including Richie — the question is definitive enough to be reassuring to a room full of people who are in way over their heads, and most of the room jump onto the distraction gladly. From across the circle, Stan stares at Richie like he knows exactly what he’s doing, like he can see through to Richie’s _soul_ , but he’s not close enough to stop Richie from doing what he does next. 

What Richie does next is lean back against the headboard and allow himself to be lulled by the newly-familiar sound of his best friends in the world bickering over state firearm regulations like their lives depend on it, and before he knows it, he’s drifting off to sleep.

…

Richie’s not sure what to expect this time when he wakes up into his dream — maybe another comfortably cryptic chat with the turtle god who’s been propelling them through this dreamscape adventure so far? — but it’s not what he gets, which is the clown, fifty feet tall and looming down at him like a tacky plastic lumberjack statue. “Oh, very clever, Richie,” IT booms at him, “Outsmarting your friends to come face me all on your own. Of course, you’re used to that, aren’t you? Lonely child trying to annoy people into noticing you the only way you knew how, never mind if making them notice you also made them _hate_ you,” and Richie stands there and waits for the words to hurt.

When the braced-for emotional agony doesn’t land, Richie lets out a “Huh,” and looks back up at the clown. “You’re not very strong in here, are you?”

“Oh, you’d like to think so, wouldn’t you,” the clown says, teeth stretching and expanding with every word.

“No, no, no, I think I get it, now,” Richie tells the clown conversationally. “See, you hit Stan so hard because this memory version of you came with all of the memories of the real thing crashing in at the same time, and it made you seem so much bigger than you actually were, in here. Actually are. But in here you’re, like, pocket-sized. Single-serving evil, dinner-for-one destruction.”

“That’s fine,” the clown snarls, “Because it’s like I said — you’re all _alone_ , Richie, always all alone. And I’ll have no trouble with just the one of you.”

That’s — may be true, actually, though Richie isn’t sure about it, he’s seen the real thing get taken out now. Even if there _were_ only one of him, he thinks he’d have a chance against this Polly Pocket nightmare, but that’s not the point. The point, which Richie is suddenly and blindingly sure of, is, “I’m not alone, though,” and it would have been cool if the others had appeared at exactly that moment, but since they don’t, he goes on, “Or I won’t be in a minute, anyway.”

It’s then, with just a little bit less than perfect timing, that Eddie pops into existence by Richie’s side. “Thanks for sharing with the class before charging off into danger, jerkoff,” Eddie says, fetching up comfortably close to Richie’s side, so near that Richie could reach out and take his hand, if he wanted to, and if wanting to was the kind of desire he had ever allowed himself to act on.

“I couldn’t just have wanted a nap?”

Eddie glares in reply.

“Yeah, well, you’re a smart cookie, Eds,” Richie tells him. “I figured it was only a matter of time before you caught up.”

“LITTLE EDDIE KASPBRAK,” the clown booms overhead, like it’s concerned that they’re going to forget about it. Eddie’s skeptical eyebrows in response don’t seem particularly impressed, but there isn’t really time for any further posturing because it’s then that Ben pops into the dreamscape on Eddie’s other side.

“Haystack!” Richie exclaims, cheered immensely by the building momentum of the moment. “Gonna take this clown-lette out with the old one-two? Gonna give IT a knuckle sandwich?”

But then there’s Mike, looking serious and determined, and Bill looking vaguely pissed off, and Bev looking _very_ pissed off, and Stan, finally, popping into place like he’s been here all along, and the clown is smaller, here, is weaker than any other time they’ve faced it — 

“You’re just a splinter of the real thing,” Richie tells IT, and it leers back and tries to say something that’s probably meant to be symbolic about starfish in fishing nets, but Richie and his friends grew up inland from the coast a bit, so that particular hackneyed metaphor can’t touch them.

 _You’re all at your strongest when you’re together,_ the turtle god says, maybe right there in their heads but probably just in Richie’s memory, and it’s true. Richie has Eddie and Ben and Mike and Bill and Bev and Stanley by his side, and he thinks he’s never felt stronger in his _life_.

…

Six months later, Richie picks Steve up at the Jetport.

It’s nothing he would have done at any earlier point in their professional relationship, but in the last few months Steve has been a trooper, to an almost shocking degree, as Richie has enacted what can only be described as a fairly spectacular mid-life crisis. Richie is eternally grateful that the murder charge never came to light, but even just juggling a career overhaul, a surprise elopement, and the coming out experience necessitated by that elopement, all at three thousand miles of long-distance is above and beyond the call of duty for any manager, never mind Richie’s, who has already had to deal with an unconscionable amount of bullshit in his time.

Richie thinks the fact that Steve hasn’t dropped him flat, after everything Richie has put him through since Derry, is probably as good of a sign as he’s going to get that they’re actually friends. With this in mind, he picks Steve up at the Jetport and, after an awkward moment where Richie goes for a shoulder-pat at the same moment that Steve goes for a handshake, hugs him. It’s weird, obviously, since they’ve worked together for about eight years and hugged exactly once before, but they get through it with no tears, vomit, or black eyes, so Richie decides to call it a success.

The drive back into town from the Jetport is a familiar one, these days — Ben has come down for the weekend a couple of times, and Bill came out for the week once, on his way to one of his rendezvous with Mike’s journey-of-discovery-road-trip-part-the-third. Stan and Patty have even come up for a few days. Richie’s pretty sure Ben wouldn’t come so often if Bev hadn’t moved into an apartment above a store-front in the old port, but he’ll take what he can get. The feeling of being at the center of this hub of people he cares about is dizzying.

In what Richie thinks is probably the spirit of that friendship he’s pretty sure they genuinely have, at this point, Steve doesn’t say much of anything as they drive into town about the pain in the ass that it’s been staging Richie’s coming-out-come-back when he’s unwilling to commit to being away from his new home in Portland for longer than a few days. He listens to Richie wander around verbally, narrating the highway, the other drivers, and the things Steve is going to like or, alternatively, hate about the town.

In fact, it’s not until Richie is parking the car, only a few blocks away from the restaurant where they’re meeting Eddie that Steve finally says, “Yeah, okay, it’s pretty here, Rich, I get that part. But what did you do, sell your soul to this place?”

Richie laughs, and it’s mostly at Steve’s light, resigned frustration, but of course there’s a little edge of something else mixed into the sound. He wants to give Steve an honest answer, he thinks, or as honest of an answer as he can without freaking the guy out. “Nah, man,” he says, finally. “I just like who I am here, you know?”

…

When they had opened their eyes after that last nap between time and space, the other Richie was gone.

“That’s handy,” Richie had said, looking at the empty space where his other body had lain on the bed earlier. “Not that I couldn’t have hidden the body. We must be close to earning our tampering-with-evidence merit badges, by now.”


End file.
